“After keeping so much bottled up for so long, I feel very much like an ingenue—a virgin if you will—rediscovering some things, discovering, touching and feeling other things for the first time. I want to say in my music, ‘Look at this! Isn’t it wonderful, or painful, or glorious, or sad, or funny? I’ve felt this way before, haven’t you?’ I want to say, ‘Look at us. We’re all scared as hell to feel this, but ain’t this something?’ ”—Rene Marie

Photo by Howard A. Gitelson

With the aplomb and voicings of a seasoned stage veteran, and the energy and delighted delivery of a still-rising star, singer Rene Marie takes the stage at the Jazz Showcase in Chicago, December 13-18. Marie has been compared to Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan and Nancy Wilson. Yet the story of her career is as much about the time she spent not singing as the time she has more recently spent in the public eye. She was exposed to music as a young child growing up in Roanoke, VA; her parents were both teachers who surrounded their children with classical, bluegrass, calypso, and Mitch Miller (“everything but jazz,” she says). Self taught (“I wanted to sound like myself, not somebody else”), she started out as an R& B singer around Roanoke, performing professionally from age 15, not discovering jazz until she saw the film, Lady Sings the Blues. But after marrying one of her bandmates at age 18 and becoming a mother at 20, she put her career on hold for the next two decades, although she continued listening to Ella and Sarah. Later, she says, “I realized I had a life, my own experiences, and something to say” and stopped listening to other voices, instead looking at creating her own. In 1996, with encouragement from her sons, she returned to performing, first at a Roanoke Holiday Inn, then in Richmond after leaving her husband and job at a bank, ultimately devoting full time to music. Now, just passed 50 and with a self-produced CD and 4 recordings on MaxJazz, her career has reached legendary heights in only a few years.

Both critics and fans have piled on the accolades: The Academie du Jazz in France selected her second MaxJazz recording, Vertigo, as the Best International Jazz Vocal CD of 2002, beating out recordings from Joni Mitchell and Cassandra Wilson. Both JazzTimes (U.S.) and Jazz Review (U.K.) chose Vertigo as one of the best CDs of 2002, and DownBeat critics voted her one of their "Rising Star Vocalists" that year. Her first two CDs (including the aptly titled How Can I Keep From Singing? on MaxJazz) also topped the jazz charts and won AFIM (Association for Independent Music) Awards for Best Jazz & Cabaret Vocal. Her third MAXJAZZ release, Live At Jazz Standard, hit the top 20 on Billboard’s jazz chart a month before its official release. Her fourth MaxJazz recording, Serene Renegade, released in fall 2004, has carried her star to farther reaches of the galaxy, with 9 original tunes that paint the story of her own life as well as the lives of her family members. BET jazz honored this recording as one of its top ten picks of 2004.

I last saw Rene Marie a year ago in Minneapolis, in a set that featured tunes from Serene Renegade and earlier recordings, most notably a fusion of Leonard Cohen’s "Suzanne" with a scatted, a cappella reading of Ravel’s "Bolero, a sultry “Nature Boy,” and a clever Marie original, “Paris on Ponce.” Her affinity for strange musical mergers goes back to Vertigo where she made the gutsy decision to sing the White South anthem “Dixie” with the Billie Holiday signature tune, “Strange Fruit”—or maybe that is not so strange given Rene Marie’s tendency to fuse powerful emotions into new ideas.

Said the Miami Herald, “Great art comes from taking chances. Jazz vocalist René Marie takes some doozies...” Take no chance and reserve your place at one of Rene Marie’s upcoming performances.

Find Rene Marie and her touring band --Takana Miyamoto, piano; Herman Burney, bass; and Quentin Baxter, drums, at the Jazz Showcase in downtown Chicago, www.jazzshowcase.com. On New Year’s Eve, hear Rene Marie on NPR’s Toast of the Nation, or live in Columbia MD broadcast from Murry’s. In January 2006, she will be touring with Matt Wilson’s Arts and Crafts. More on Rene Marie is available at www.renemarie.com