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October 2011

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It was only a cellphone connection, but the voice sounded unmistakably like the clear-channel stylings of Al Jarreau as he crooned a musical scale.

"La-la-la-LA-la-la," Jarreau sang, to show how he's tending his pipes at age 71. The seven-time Grammy winner's renewed vigor, demonstrated in a recent tour that crossed Europe and Asia, offers considerable relief after a health scare last year when Jarreau collapsed on stage in the French Alps and was hospitalized with critical respiratory and cardiac problems.

"I feel good," he said during the telephone interview last week from his home in Los Angeles. "I've made some changes and I have a good medical team."

Jarreau's philosophy of existence can loosely be summarized by the title of his biggest hit: "We're In This Love Together."

"There is a spirituality in my music that comes from certain convictions of who we are," he said. "More than the 'thou shalts,' we have an obligation to each other as human beings, as intelligent life. It's coming out of this thing we simply call God, the voice that is and always will be."

Not so for the human voice, and the septuagenarian singer is philosophical about that, too. "No matter what you do, when you're doing it as long as I have, your voice shows wear," Jarreau said. "I don't have all the octaves I used to have, but the lower ranges have opened up some. You work inside those parameters."

Jarreau was giving his voice a break in California after returning from a six-week, 21-city European tour that included makeup concerts he'd canceled last year when he was hospitalized. He followed summer European concerts with a swing to the Tokyo Jazz Festival this month and is set to play the Taft Theatre on Saturday with the George Duke Trio.

Jarreau and Duke just released a new live album, if that's a way to describe performances recorded some 45 years ago. Duke, who in the 1960s was house pianist at San Francisco's Half Note Club, used a reel-to-reel recorder to preserve his trio's sessions with Jarreau there.

"Those were fun times," Jarreau said. "You know what a Wollensak is? It's an old two-headed tape recorder, where one side received. The album is called 'Al Jarreau and the George Duke Trio Live at the Half Note,' with music we were doing between '65 and '68."

At the time, Jarreau had a day job. The Milwaukee native had earned an undergraduate degree in psychology from Wisconsin's Ripon College and a master's in vocational rehabilitation from the University of Iowa. He'd come to San Francisco to work in career counseling.

By the late 1960s, he'd counseled himself to seek a full-time career as a singer. Jarreau, with a five-octave voice that could imitate a half-a-dozen instruments and alternately sound as if it were forged in a foundry or spun like silk, disembarked for Los Angeles in pursuit of his dream.

There he became a busy nightclub performer, enjoying occasional TV appearances on national talk shows hosted by Johnny Carson, Merv Griffin and David Frost. His breakout album, We Got By, came out in 1975, a decade after the first Half Note recordings.

By the 1980s, he'd established himself among the world's premier singers, with crossover success that earned him iconic '80s pop stature: He had a solo line on the "We Are the World" video and sang the theme to "Moonlighting," the TV series that launched Bruce Willis.

In 1993, when his Heaven and Earth album brought him a Grammy for Best R&B Vocal Performance, he became one of the few performers ever to collect Grammys in three genres (jazz, pop, R&B).

At the start of the last decade he began playing concerts with major symphony orchestras including Cincinnati's. The Queen City has been a regular stop for Jarreau and is home to Guy Vance and Sam Moore, two of Jarreau's closest friends from their days as classmates at Lincoln High School in Milwaukee.

"I've made a nice living and my name is mentioned in the same sentence with Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin, Sting," Jarreau said. "I'm very lucky. I've done things my way."

Nice article.

Another unsung hero........ I call him the male Ella Fitzgerald because the things this man can do with his mouth are beyond exceptional. He should have a vocal lesson class so my generation can learn how it is done PROPERLY!!!

Great catching up with Al Jarreau. Yes, I'd agree, he IS somewhat unsung! I have much of his stuff, all of the early vinyl. Love seeing him live, too.

I used to LOVE Al back in the day! I'm glad he is still performing. Cheers to ya, Al!