Music Scene

COURTESY PHOTO Talented up-and-coming Los Angeles-based singer Raya Yarbrough, appearing at SOhO on Monday, happily crosses over between jazz and other styles, and has created a hybrid genre and festival, dubbed "alternajazz."

Crossing lines and singing up storms

RAYA YARBROUGH CREATES 'ALTERNAJAZZ'

RAYA YARBROUGH, with Rebecca Kleinman

By Josef Woodard
NEWS-PRESS CORRESPONDENT

Eclectic-minded, jazz-inspired singer Raya Yarbrough might be a better-known name on the music scene if she hadn't fallen victim to the fickle twists of fate in the music industry.

A gifted singer who freely crosses stylistic lines, she was signed to the N-Coded label two years ago, at the age of 21. She was flown to New York and feted, looking forward to making her debut on the label which also launched the career of noted young jazz singer Jane Monheit. Then the label folded.

Signed right out of college, Yarbrough was thrilled by the idea of having her career jump-started at an early age. As she recalls on the phone from home in Los Angeles, "I go to New York and there's the car and the room service and the stylist and there's a big studio with great people. We do all these great recordings. I don't hear from them for a while when I get back to L.A., and I don't know what the deal is. Meanwhile, I get a new boyfriend, the cat dies, all kinds of things happen. Then I found out they (N-Coded) went bankrupt."

She tried to quickly transform her one-that-got-away music-biz story into a positive. "For a while," she says, "I was depressed, and then I was kind of happy about it. I had time to restructure my sound and I realized that this grace period of over a year has given me time to write songs I wouldn't have had and to learn things I wouldn't have learned. By the time I put out this next record, it will be better."

The L.A.-born-and-raised singer, who plays regularly in Southern California venues, will appear at SOhO along with local flutist Rebecca Kleinman and other musicians on Monday night. She has released two albums on her own and is close to signing a deal with an independent label, which she hesitates to name before the ink dries.

Yarbrough grew up in a creatively alive house. She's the daughter of a singer-songwriter father, Martin Yarbrough (who will also perform at SOhO), whose résumé includes work with Earth, Wind and Fire and Miriam Makeba and supplying songs for the blaxploitation classic "The Black Godfather." Her mother is a screenwriter and her stepfather an architect, making for a household she calls "lousy with artists. Everyone's pretty darn imaginative. Not always terribly practical, but definitely imaginative."

Now Yarbrough's 23, a ripe young age in jazz, if pushing the age limit in the increasingly teen-obsessed world of pop, and she has already built up an impressive dossier of experience. She has worked in many jazz and rock clubs in L.A., at the Jazz Standard in New York City and at the Playboy Jazz Festival.

Self-motivation seems to come naturally. She formed her own band at age 17. Two years ago, she founded a new hybrid genre she calls "alternajazz," suggesting the free blending of elements from jazz, pop, soul and other styles just off to the side of jazz in any purist sense. Culling the interests of other diversely-minded jazz artists, she has organized quarterly "alternajazz" festivals. The next one takes place Jan. 9 at Tangiers restaurant in the Los Feliz area of L.A.

Underlying her musical philosophy, demonstrated on the range of ideas and genres on her latest self-released album, "Raya's Mood," is the idea that wide-ranging concepts come with the territory in jazz.

"Jazz is a sponge," Yarbrough says. "There are certain elements, like swing and harmonic things that happened, certain instrumentation commonly associated with jazz. But now there's hip-hop and funk happened and techno happened, and classical music is still happening. All of these elements fit in really nicely. People who have big ears, who just enjoy music, can't help but work these elements into what they do. That makes it more exciting."

By extension, Yarbrough sees the trap of keeping jazz in historical boxes, and comments that "when people who say they're purists say, 'You have to preserve jazz,' I don't agree with that. Preservation is for something that's dead. It's really important that people still play straight-ahead jazz and know where it came from and understand the roots of it all. But jazz is struggling right now. Making the jazz departments smaller at labels hurts everyone who loves it. So 'alternajazz' is all about appreciating the diversity that's really inherent to jazz, and the fun of it."

Does she sense that there's something akin to a movement afoot with the musicians who fit into her "alternajazz" concept? "I don't know about a movement," Yarbrough says, "but possibly a circle. Let's say a 'scene.' Movement sounds a bit like people walking around with signs.

"There is a scene afoot," Yarbrough says. "People are getting word and realizing they might fit into this category. People also have in their minds ideas about what jazz is. The teens up through the 30s, a lot of them think, 'I don't know that much about jazz.' Then they come to the festival and say, 'Oh, I dig this stuff. It's cool.' Then the 50-plus audience comes for the old stuff and they realize that the new stuff isn't so treacherous. It's not like people screaming and breaking things. They're people who are thinking in some new ways and doing stuff that can be exciting."

In her case, Yarbrough blends jazz and other musical instincts in ways that could appeal to various demographics of music fans. She possesses supple melodic skills and an implicit sense of swing and, in her originals, leans toward a range of influences including Joni Mitchell and Steely Dan (arguably the finest pop band ever to incorporate jazz in its musical DNA).

She takes the challenge of breaking through in stride, figuring that "sometimes, when you don't walk on the beaten path, it's difficult to make your career walk the same way other people have. People can't say, 'You're this' and 'you're that.' I can't tell you how many different labels, some big labels, who have listened and taken the time to write back and say, 'Look, we really like what you're doing, but we don't know what to do with it.' "

As for her wandering musical tastes, Yarbrough admits, "It's hard to filter out things, because you hear lot of (different music) that inspires you. Cutting off your inspiration is like cutting off a limb."

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