Singer Gretchen Parlato turned 50 this year. And her new album, The Wise Ones, finds her looking both backward and forward.
She's reunited with musicians who helped establish her distinctive sound nearly twenty years ago, including pianist Robert Glasper, bassist and songwriter Alan Hampton, and her husband, drummer Mark Guiliana.
But the album also features younger artists who grew up listening to her music. And as Parlato explained, the significance of all this only became clear as the record came together.
She explains, "I didn't really know the complete statement as we were making it. It was more of like, I know I wanna work with these people. Let's just get the repertoire together. And as it was being gathered, then the whole story kind of unfolds ... I'll have turned 50. Oh, wow, okay. What does that mean?"
For Parlato, the process of finding her own voice began long before she became an influential jazz singer. She grew up in Los Angeles, surrounded by musicians and artists. She attended the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts and studied jazz at UCLA.
She loved singers like Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, and Whitney Houston. But she recognized early on that her voice was different.
"Even when I was young singing popular music, singing, belting Whitney Houston, it was very clear to me that my voice doesn't do that,” Parlato remembers. “I wanna sing jazz, but I don't have this typical jazz singer voice. What can I do with this?"
Her first private jazz teacher, Tierney Sutton, encouraged her to embrace that difference. And then there was a discovery she made as a teenager, sitting on the floor of her family's home, going through her mother's record collection.
She recalls, "Pulling out, just based on the cover first, Getz/Gilberto. And then putting that on and just having this what's happening moment, hearing these voices that were so unique, so understated, so intimate. Something happened in my body," she remembers.
Parlato found a musical language that suited her naturally understated voice. And over time, she developed an approach that brought Brazilian music, jazz standards, and contemporary pop into the same musical world.
Her albums In a Dream and The Lost and Found, released in 2009 and 2011, helped establish her reputation as one of the most distinctive singers in contemporary jazz.
But just as her career was gathering momentum, another chapter of her life began.
She became a mother at 38, and decided to devote much of her time to raising her son, Marley. She continued performing, often bringing him on tour, handing him to a family member when it was time to go onstage.
As she tells it, "Here I am, artist mode for my set. Soon as you walk off stage, there's my child again. I knew that I didn't wanna miss any moment of my son's development and I knew in the back of my head, like, my life experience will inform the next creative outlet that I have."
That experience eventually became part of her album Flor. And after exploring different musical directions in recent years, she felt ready to return to the quartet sound of her earlier records, and the musicians who helped her create it. And it paid off.
She says, "We're starting to get feedback and reviews acknowledging the impact that this artist has had on the scene. And that is the greatest gift you could get in your lifetime, being alive to see that and not have it be once we're dead and gone. Everyone should get their flowers when they're alive."
Gretchen Parlato's new album is The Wise Ones, on Edition Records.
