Margie Baker Sings with So Many StarsMargie
Baker's storied career as a jazz and blues vocalist started late, when she was
39, but was long encouraged by her mentor Dizzy Gillespie and eventually took
her to the world stage. Though the 80-year-old Baker came even later to
recording, she's on a roll now, affiliated with longtime Gillespie pianist Mike
Longo's Consolidated Artists Productions (CAP) label. Her 4th CD, and third for
CAP, is Margie Baker Sings with So Many Stars, and is due for release on May
20.
So Many
Stars is a two-disc set on which Baker surrounds herself with some of the most
gifted instrumentalists in the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond. Her relaxed
and swinging phrasing, warm tone, and precise enunciation inform every number,
including songs by Ellington ("Come Sunday," "In a Mellow Tone,"
"I'm Just a Lucky So and So"), Monk ("'Round Midnight"),
and Horace Silver ("Señor Blues"), as well as standards like
"You've Changed," "Deed I Do," and "Lazy
Afternoon."
Among
her accompanists, whom she calls "Margie's musical galaxy," are
pianist Shota Osabe, guitarist Rodney Jones, saxophonists Jules Broussard and
Melecio Magdaluyo, bassists Harley White and Chuck Bennett, and percussionist
John Santos, a sixth-grade student of Baker's when she taught in the San
Francisco Unified School District.
"This
is a tribute to them," says Baker of the players on the CD. "These
are not egocentric, big-time musicians, but they're wonderful musicians. We
work so much and so well together."
Margie BakerMargie Baker was born October 11,
1933 "in a shack in the sticks" near Center, Texas, in Shelby County.
"Black people were extremely deprived back there in those sticks,"
she says. "That's where I was born -- from dirt-poor, beautiful, spiritual
people."
After
her parents divorced, mother and daughter relocated to San Francisco at the
onset of World War II. Her mother found work as a riveter at shipyards in San
Francisco and Oakland, and the two lived at first in a cold-water flat in San
Francisco's overwhelmingly African-American Fillmore District.
Upon
graduating with honors from Girls High School at age 15, Baker a received a
scholarship to the University of California Berkeley, where she spent two years
before transferring to San Francisco State College and earned both bachelor's
and master's degrees. Years later, she used earnings from her part-time singing
career to enroll at the University of San Francisco, from which she received a
Ph.D in Education. Baker moved from the classroom into school district
headquarters as Director of Compensatory Education, where she oversaw the
distribution of federal funds to help low-income children in reading and math.
When
Dizzy Gillespie, her friend since she was a 17-year-old fashion model and a
sophomore at UC Berkeley, finally heard her sing, he offered to take her on the
road, but her responsibilities as a teacher, and eventually as an
administrator, came first. She would, however, go on to sit in with his band
when their paths crossed in Tokyo, New York City, Oakland, and San Francisco.
She retired in 2004, after 48 years of service as an educator.
Baker
had done very little singing in public before the guitarist at Henri's Room at
the Top on the 46th floor of the San Francisco Hilton Hotel coaxed her to sit
in one night. She sang "I Left My Heart in San Francisco." Hotel
magnates Conrad and Barron Hilton were in attendance and offered her a job,
which she accepted. She spent the next 18 years singing at Henri's -- two
nights a week during the school year, five in the summer -- as well as for
special affairs at the Las Vegas Hilton, where such celebrities at Tony
Bennett, Elvis Presley, and Elizabeth Taylor heard her sing. She also became a
regular performer at the Monterey Jazz Festival and traveled the world with the
festival's touring shows that included such jazz greats as James Moody and
Richie Cole. For the past decade, Baker has sung during brunch every Sunday at
the Hyatt Regency Hotel near the San Francisco International Airport, as well
as at other hotels, clubs, and churches.
As the
20 tracks on the new CD indicate, Margie Baker remains a song stylist of the
first order. The only thing that has really changed is, she jokingly admits,
"I don't shake my booty as much."
Baker
will be appearing 6/1 at the Regency Ballroom at the Hyatt Regency Hotel/San
Francisco Airport in Burlingame, 5:00-10:00 pm, with many of the musicians
heard on So Many Stars; and 6/14 at the Mildred Owens Concert Hall in Pacifica,
7:30 pm, with Keith Williams, piano; Jim Nichols, guitar; Michael O'Neill,
tenor saxophone; Chuck Bennett, bass; and Jerry Pannone, drums.
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