What Diane Schuur remembers most about living in Vancouver is eating watermelon and zooming around on roller skates with her buddies from the girls’ cottages. And she remembers leaping and tumbling in a playroom while jazz records her parents had sent from home played on the phonograph.
“We used to have these parties,” said the jazz singer. “We had some great times.” Schuur has a photographic memory, she said, but she didn’t mention any skinned knees or elbows — which is just a little surprising for a blind child on roller skates.
Schuur was born blind in Tacoma. She attended the Washington School for the Blind, here in Vancouver, from age four to age 11. She’d already been exposed to her mother’s jazz records, and started singing and teaching herself piano by ear. It was obvious to all that she was prodigiously gifted with perfect pitch and that great memory.
But her parents wanted her to build specialized survival skills, and there was no public school for the blind in her hometown. For the first few years they brought her to the school; by age seven she was taking trains by herself.
“I remember being very homesick. I would cry. I remember I sort of cried myself to sleep on the train and I woke up on the conductor’s lap. He was so kind to me, he talked to me and comforted me. He was quite wonderful. That’s a memory I’ll always cherish.”
Schuur returns to Vancouver this weekend. She’ll sing and play piano with a band that includes Bruce Lett on bass, Kendall Day on drums and John Nastos of Portland on saxophone. “It’ll be a swinging show,” she said. “Be there or be square!”
Also appearing at this concert will be a jazz ensemble from Battle Ground High School, under the direction of Greg McKelvey and Darcy Schmitt.
Playing by ear
Vancouver is where Schuur first studied piano and voice. She remembers learning the piano keyboard the way typists learn to touch-type. “On the piano there are two `home rows’,” the middle C row and the lower G row, that Schuur could find thanks to the keyboard’s pattern of sharps, flats and naturals — those black and white keys she could feel but not see.
Her mother took her to meet blind piano star George Shearing, who encouraged her to study Braille music notation. But Schuur was more interested in playing with his guide dog, she said. “I kept playing by ear,” she said.
However she managed it, Schuur has gone on to greatness in the field of jazz. She’s collaborated with everyone from Ray Charles and B.B. King to the Count Basie Orchestra and Frank Sinatra (who once asked her to please fill in at a concert when Liza Minelli couldn’t make it), and she’s won two Grammy awards for Best Jazz Vocal Performance.
Somewhere along the way she met saxophone great Stan Getz, who became her mentor and champion. “One thing he taught me is that less is more,” Schuur said. “You don’t have to do all the gymnastics, all the time.”
Getz, an alcoholic who gave up drinking, tried to teach Schuur that lesson too. “He tried, but I wasn’t ready,” she said. “I finally got the message. I have now been sober for 27 and a half years.”
Her latest album, released in 2014, is dedicated to Getz and Sinatra. It’s called “I Remember You (With Love to Stan and Frank).”
In 1982, Getz took Schuur with him to sing in a jazz showcase at the White House.She performed alongside musical royalty such as Itzhak Perlman, Dizzy Gillespie and Chick Corea. After the performance, Schuur said, “some chick gave me a big hug but I didn’t know who it was. I was mouthing, `Who is this?'”
It was First Lady Nancy Reagan. “Her perfume clung to my clothing for weeks,” Schuur said.
