The Fran Jaré Quartet, Anne MacDonald Studio (adjacent to Presentation House Theatre) North Vancouver, Saturday, Oct. 26 at 8 p.m. Doors open 7:30 p.m. $15 cover.
Fran Jaré is having a hard time pinpointing which jazz vocalists are her favorite to cover.
"Vocally would be Diane Schuur, Carmen McRae, Anita O'Day, Ella, of course," says Jaré, referring to jazz icon Ella Fitzgerald. "And there are some contemporary people that I really like."
She then adds a current pop diva to the mix.
"I like the way Beyoncé has done some of the standards as well, which people don't know about but I really admire that," she says.
Jaré is bringing her band to the Anne MacDonald
Studio on Oct. 26. The Fran Jaré Quartet includes saxophonist and flutist Tom Keenlyside, bassist Brent Gubbels and drummer Buff Allen, and Jaré has nothing but praise and admiration for them.
"I've worked with them a number of times," she says. "Tom Keenlyside (is) one of the most exquisite flute players I would have to say in Canada. He's just such an extraordinary, world class musician" Keenlyside was inducted into the B.C. Entertainment Hall of Fame in 2006 and has worked with artists across a variety of genres, including Dizzy Gillespie, Van Halen and Kenny Rogers.
Jaré calls bass player Brent Gubbels 'the rock.' Gubbels has performed at both the Lincoln and John F. Kennedy centres for the performing arts.
"As musicians say, 'he lays the time down,'" says Jaré.
"He's very much sought-after as a musician here. He's also performed with the Calgary
and Edmonton Symphony and Winnipeg Symphony."
Juno Award winner Buff Allen has also done an incredible amount of commercial work in R&B
and pop, and of course jazz, says Jaré.
"These are giants in jazz that he's worked with- Ed Bickert, Moe Koffman, Paul Horn, the famous Rob McConnell from Canada, Lenny Breau - worldrenowned jazz musicians," says Jaré.
The band will be performing a large repertoire divided into two sets, with one half being entirely original music.
"We have such a wonderful mix of originals," says Jaré. "The rest of it is a mix of contemporary jazz and also back to the roots, doing a tribute to Oscar Peterson and some other people like Carmen McRae, Ella and Anita O'Day. There are no musical barriers, the musical barriers were meant to be broken. So when people think of jazz, it encompasses so much and I want it to be for everyone, every listener."
The Anne MacDonald Studio, an old church that was converted into a rehearsal space, sits adjacent to the Presentation House Theatre in North Vancouver.
"When I saw the little heritage house and I saw a few concerts there - I thought how perfect because it's small and it doesn't have to have such a great amount of people. It's just so beautiful, it gives you this feeling, this ambience of total relaxation and joy," says Jaré. "The acoustics are divine, I was just amazed. If you dropped a pin you could hear it drop. Once the people are in there it's just the perfect balance."
Getting the quartet together for the performance meant aligning everyone's busy schedules. Jaré says they were all keen to work together and there was a lot of correspondence back and forth amongst the group.
"We did a lot by phone or email, asking what would you like to collaborate with, what can you share, what can you offer," says Jaré, adding they have worked on some of the selections before. "Everybody has something to offer so it's such a treat."
Jaré says their audience demographic tends to be more middle-aged, but including pop and R&B material tends to draw in the younger crowd.
"The audiences are, I would say, very appreciative of what we do," she says. "We try to appeal to those people and to ourselves as artists."
Improvising and vocals can also bring people in, says Jaré.
"I think we're very blessed to have a listening crowd," she says. "They haven't thrown any tomatoes and onions at us yet, but one never knows."
Jaré was born in Chicago and moved to Canada more than 40 years ago. She and her husband, originally from Alberta, decided to make Vancouver their home and currently reside in North Vancouver. Her career in music started when she graduated in 1965 from DePaul University School of Music in Chicago where she received her Bachelor of
Music in organ and minored in piano.
"I did all of the Bach and (César) Franck and the baroque and all of that on the pipe organ," says Jaré. "There isn't a big market for organ concerts but I just dive at the chance to go hear them, because I love it so much."
After graduation, she was asked to go on tour playing piano for a year with the Lloyd Lindroth Show, an instrumental group, doing shows at Harrah's in Las Vegas, Reno, Tahoe, San Francisco and the Stage Door at the Winnipeg Inn, "before disco was in vogue." It was with this group that Jaré opened for music icon, Antonio Carlos Jobim, a moment Jaré says she will never forget.
Jobim, now best known by general audiences as the composer of one of the most recorded songs in history, "The Girl from Ipanema," was relatively unknown at the time.
"We were the opening act for him and so all the musicians had the rooms in the hotel. I remember that his door was open and I went in there and he was so gracious and I actually sat on the piano bench, there was a piano in this banquet room, and we had traded solos, I'll never forget that in my entire life," says Jaré. "It was a very special moment and then when of course he became a legend, it was a very special memory."
Years later in 1972, Jaré was performing in a trio with her sister Angie Jaree at the Palmer House hotel in Chicago for $1,000 a week. She would take away yet another memory of one of the biggest acts in music history.
"The Supremes were upstairs and we were downstairs, and I performed with my sister who now is one of the top ten studio singers in Los Angeles," says Jaré. "I think this was a novelty because we had an all-girl trio and she knew this really, really fun drummer. And so the three of us, on our breaks, would go upstairs to the (Empire) Room and watch the Supremes, with their gorgeous sequined dresses and beautiful vocals."
She says the famous group recognized the young trio and would smile at them.
"Every chance we had, we'd go upstairs and watch them," says Jaré.
The gig lasted just short of two months. Jaré was leaving Chicago for Canada to get married and her agent was less than enthused.
"Muriel Abbott, an elderly woman with a hair net, I'll never forget, was Jack Jones' agent. She was totally furious when I had to leave," says Jaré. "We almost had to laugh inside the way she was carrying on. We could have had that standing gig for a long time."
Some of Jaré's favorite memories now happen in the moment when she's performing.
"When there's some magical moments that happen and the group is feeding off each other, or I should say the interplay of spontaneous, in the moment, solos," Jaré says.
Recently she has had some great moments with her other band, Soul Trax.
"At Harmony Arts Festival this last August, the band seemed to have the happening chemistry on our last tune," she says. "The crowd kept shouting 'more,' but we had to move on for the next group. It was a very meaningful performance."
Besides Soul Trax and quartet work, Jaré also does solo and duo work, and continues trio work, though no longer with her sister. She enjoys the experience of interchanging between the groups.
"That's really the fun part because it gives you that opportunity to do all the crossovers and then of course it shows the versatility of these musicians, they're not stuck into one genre," says Jaré. "I think it gives you a lot more spontaneity and it makes one have to do a lot more research into it, and helps you to become so much better and improved as
a musician."
Jaré, playing a B3 organ, will be reuniting with Gubbels and Allen in November for a tribute to Shirley Scott and Jimmy Smith at Cory Weeds' Cellar Jazz Club, along with fellow musicians trumpeter Chris Davis and saxophonist Dave Say. She is also hoping to do some more composing.
"I definitely want to do another CD," she says. "I'd like to do an album of originals, maybe include one standard, with some of these incredible, exquisite musicians that I have been blessed to perform with."
Jaré finds when she's composing, inspiration comes from a variety of sources.
"I guess it would be like a writer where things would just happen, it sometimes happens very, very quickly, spontaneously, and other times you really have to work at it," she says. "You'll come across a dead end, like a bridge of a song, and say 'this doesn't sound right,' but after you go back and leave it and come back the next day, it all tends to gel. Or I should say it comes into place."
