As singer Catherine Russell turns 70 she wants to remind you that one is never too old to swing. Seventy is a nice round number to celebrate. But in Russell’s case, there’s another anniversary hiding inside it.
She’s only been Catherine Russell the solo artist, bandleader, the name on the marquee, for twenty years.
She says, “I’s been 20 years of this. and before that it was... maybe 20 years of the... backup thing and just singing with different bands.”
And “different bands” is putting it mildly. Before releasing her first album under her own name in 2006, Russell spent decades building one of those careers that reminds you how musicians actually make a life in music.
She sang songwriter demos and jingles. She worked at Catch a Rising Star during the comedy boom of the 1980s. She performed on Broadway in Big River. She toured with Samantha Fox, Cyndi Lauper, Steely Dan and David Bowie.
And again and again, the next thing seemed to happen because somebody told her about a gig.
She remembers, “Somebody called me and said, ‘Listen, I think you should go over here.’ I would end up in the studio with some of those people and go, ‘Ooh. All right, good. I’m in the right place.’”
And once she was in the room, she paid attention. She learned studio craft. How to listen. How to blend with other singers. How to make herself useful.
“My ears are good. But learning about blending and listening to them, like not yakking in the studio. Just shut up and listen, and listen and learn something,” she explains
For years, that was enough. She was a working musician. Then, after Russell came home from touring with David Bowie in 2004, her husband Paul Kahn suggested there was one thing she still hadn’t done.
She explains, “He said, ‘Well, you know, there’s something you haven’t done, which is lead your own group.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, but... then I gotta make all the decisions.’”
Kahn told her to choose twelve songs she liked. They went to a studio outside Chicago, assembled a band, and made the record that became Cat. Russell was nearly 50. And in choosing those songs, and then the musicians to play them, something began to come into focus.
“I had to find what I could do better. You know, like you have to find where you are in jazz. So I like rhythm... I like swing and I like blues,” she says.
Russell had been surrounded by that history from the beginning. Her father, Luis Russell, came to the United States from Panama, became an important bandleader in the early days of swing, and led the orchestra Louis Armstrong fronted in the 1930s.
Her mother, Carline Ray, studied at Juilliard, played with the International Sweethearts of Rhythm and remained a working musician throughout Catherine’s childhood, sometimes bringing her daughter along to recording sessions.
But Russell had to find her own way into that history. Twenty years after finally putting her own name on the band, she’s still doing it largely the way she always has: listening, working, finding songs, and seeing where the next call leads.
There is one difference between the life Catherine Russell has as a touring musician today and the one her parents knew. And it’s one she doesn’t take for granted.
“I am very grateful to be able to tour the way I tour now, because they didn’t have those opportunities at that point. It was not easy for them... I can walk in the front doors of places. I can stay in nice hotels and play nice places... So that’s a whole different thing than what they went through,” she says.
Catherine Russell celebrates her 70th birthday with two nights at Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Rose Theater, October 2nd and 3rd.
Watch my full conversation with Catherine Russell here.
