She’s come a long way since that first gig as a folk singer in a cocktail lounge. From Pete Seeger to Shirley Horn to Jay Clayton, Kendra Shank has followed diverse muses, consequently evolving into one of the most inventive vocalists in modern jazz. If her 2007 release A Spirit Free revealed her sharp edges in reinterpreting Abbey Lincoln, then her new Mosaic (Challenge Records) reveals the softer contours of a more personal, perhaps freer spirit. To Kendra, making music is akin to “sound painting,” an interesting choice of metaphor given her background in the visual arts and tendency to “hear music in shapes and colors.” What shapes and colors her music today, and particularly the songs and lyrics that form Mosaic?

JazzINK: You started out as a visual artist. How does this background impact your music?
Kendra: I hypothesize that the reason I approach music as “sound painting” is because I started out very visually oriented. I used to see everything in pictures. When I was a kid I always had a sketchbook, I was always drawing. Everything I saw would be in pictures—light and color as if a Monet painting. Now, I am so oriented to music and the ear that I hear music in conversation or in traffic. Song quotes are always coming to me during conversation. I think my visual acuity is expressing itself through sound paintings―I hear music in shapes and colors.

As I get more comfortable with free improvisation, I feel that kind of music has the same elements as abstract expressionist painting. It’s like seeing a Miró or a Pollock [when I hear music]. And one very small thing can make such a difference. On a canvas, in an abstract expressionist painting, one little dab of a red brushstroke on this particular spot makes that painting special. Maybe it is the elements of design? It creates an energy in one spot, and I have heard music that way, which is why silence is important. Silence is the canvas, you have to leave spaces so when you hit the note, or color it a certain way, it can be that little red brushstroke.

Kendra Shank (Photo © John Abbott)

Around the time you released A Spirit Free, you mentioned that you were hoping to spend more time on composition. Are you continuing to work on composing?
I keep scribbling parts of lyrics and put them into a file, and eventually I think I will come back to it. There is a composer in me, I keep saying that. But the way it is being expressed now is in spontaneous composition, improv, and that seems to be my outlet.

Tell me about your new projects, the a capella group and the work with the Mark Lamb Dance Company.
When I turned 50 [last year] something happened, like a new chapter, a rebirth, a very positive thing that catapulted me into work with renewed energy. I want to do a million things at once with new inspirations. I don’t have the unlimited energy as when I was younger, but I am feeling inspired!

The a cappella group is five singers, three women and two men. All of us were students of Rhiannon. We’ve been doing improvised music, getting together with a view of evolving to the point of performing, probably before the year is over. We’re finding our own identity, using elements of Rhiannon and Bobby McFerrin, but it’s not a copycat group.  It’s really cool and magical. We get together and improvise, and these musical pieces just emerge in the moment, sometimes with improvised words, sometimes wordless, and sometimes with physical movement.

Speaking of physical movement, what about your work with the Mark Lamb Dance Company?
I just got offered my first gig with them for a June performance in New York. This project combines two things. The Dance Company is already established – four women and two men at the moment. Mark Lamb has been listening to my music for years and wanted to collaborate.  The dance is improvised, and the music is improvised, with Kyoko Kitamura and me, two voices. Kyoko is an amazing improviser, leads a group called ok I ok, which is new music that is really amazing, cutting edge, very modern. She does all sorts of things with her voice. I come from a more lyrical place so we make an interesting combination.

When we got together with Mark Lamb Dance for our first exploratory session, we felt an immediate affinity with them. Mark wanted us to move with the dancers and use our bodies. I’m not oriented that way and I don’t know how to use my body that way, but it immediately started to work. We were singing unmiked and moving and interacting with the dancers, and the dancers vocalized and improvised with words. They have been doing that for years, telling stories while they dance. We are singing melodic lines of music and making all kinds of sounds with our voices. They do this thing called “contact dancing,” which is improvising with each other physically, very similarly to how we improvise vocally -- the parallels are striking.

Your lyricism and inventive spirit remind me of Norma Winstone, whom you have mentioned as a favorite singer/lyricist. Have you considered performing or recording any of her music?
I have recorded some of her lyrics. Her lyrics are poetry, a big influence on me from early on. I got to sing with her once but not on stage. There was a group called Vocal Summit led by my teacher and mentor, Jay Clayton. Years ago when I was in Paris, they were rehearsing for a festival gig and one of the singers was unable to do it, so Jay asked me to sit in at rehearsal! I had only been singing jazz for a couple years then... On my Reflections CD, I recorded Norma’s “A Timeless Place” (lyrics by Norma, music by Jimmy Rowles ― originally titled “The Peacocks”). I love her work with Azymuth.  

On Mosaic, it seems that you were looking for a sound that would be a contrast to the Abbey Lincoln project. Was this taking a sharp turn or did A Spirit Free significantly influence Mosaic?  
Because the last one was what it was, I felt like going in a new direction. I had explored my edgy side [on A Spirit Free] and that made me want to get back to something a little more lyrical, pretty, reaching back to that side of me. Also I need to keep myself interested, to balance myself out artistically. A Spirit Free brought out a certain thing in me because of the songs’ messages and how I felt about them... It is not an intellectual choice but where the music leads me. Abbey Lincoln brought out different colors in my voice that I hadn’t used in the past. That album was a departure for me in some ways and, by contrast, with Mosaic I found myself focused on a gentler emotional thing, and the coloristic thing. Just naturally, without thinking about it, I tend to shift for balance. So I feel the need to connect more now with my more sensitive side―the natural yin and yang.

Also, there was a conscious recognition that there was an aspect of my singing and sound that I had neglected for a while, that soft, almost folksy lyrical side of me, and I kind of missed it. I did make a conscious choice to go in that direction. Half the record is ballads and that was not planned, it just happened that way.

The Abbey Lincoln project was such a concept album with a theme, and my co-producer [Andrew Rowan] referred to this in the liner notes. Mosaic is going back to the way I used to make a record, as just a collection of songs I love. So, what did I want to sing, what inspired me? I started making a list and when I was done, gee, a lot of these are ballads. But I didn’t want to say there were too many ballads!

An album is like a snapshot of a moment for me. Although there was no preconceived theme, it came together in a theme--a “mosaic” of music from a lot of different sources, different areas of my musical life and development, from “So Far Away,” a Carol King tune I loved since I was 13, back when I was a folk singer, to songs from Kirk [Nurock] that I never covered before. There’s songs from folk/pop to contemporary jazz.

Sometimes you don’t know what will work til you try it out. It might be like shopping for a dress, you see it on the rack and you think it will look smashing, and then you try it on and look in a mirror and discover it doesn’t suit you at all! Selecting a song can be the same way, sometimes it doesn’t work. Or maybe sometimes I love it and I think I could make it work—there’s something about the song that I know is mine somewhere and I need to find a way. Sometimes a song takes a while to become mine, and then it’s very rewarding.

You talk about the “mosaic” theme of diversity but it also seems that there is a theme of “coming and going”? Of accepting the past and moving on? This is clearly the theme of several specific songs, but it also seems to come through (in the lyrics) across the recording as a whole.
I had wanted to do an album loosely around the idea of traveling, because much of my life was spent moving. As a child I was uprooted from place to place, then on the road a lot as an adult, and I seldom felt I could put down roots and be somewhere for a long time. So I was thinking that “So Far Away” was one of those songs, and “Movin’ On” was another, but then I didn’t have time to fully develop that concept. I needed to do some research and had no time for that.  Instead, the concept of “moving” happened more around the emotional idea of “moving on,” letting go of the past and moving forward, dealing with your demons, letting go of painful moments.

And now, you have been in one place for quite a while!
I am at the first time in my life where I feel like I never have to move again. I can live in this apartment as long as I want to. When I got this apartment I didn’t realize that this longing was in me―to have a place that I didn’t have to leave again. When I recorded these songs, my co-producer called to my attention that this is my most personal record to date. I was willing to open myself up more emotionally, show more vulnerability than in the past and access some of that emotional reality in my life.

Does it ever feel too personal—have you had to put some songs aside because they were too much about you, too painful or just too intrusive? Or are those the songs that are so meaningful you have to sing them?
Generally I am an optimistic person, the glass half full attitude—moving forward. I can’t think of a specific example but sometimes I have chosen not to sing something because it is too much, too revealing. There are things I won’t say to people. We all have our boundaries. Generally, I tend to be an open-heart-on-my-sleeve person. But as a performer, there’s a place where you have to draw the line. I like to be as vulnerable as possible in a performance because it is what makes it moving to the audience and meaningful to me, and it’s essential for being real and true. But the fact is that you are performing and if you get too deeply immersed into a song’s emotion -- if you let yourself go too far, you can lose the technical ability to deliver the song.

I can remember going so far into the story that I would start to cry--you can’t go so far that you lose physical control of your voice. I think it’s a beautiful moment when a singer goes so far that the voice cracks, but you can’t go so far that you fall apart and have a psychotherapy moment on stage—you can’t do that! You are a professional.

What happens when you realize you are at that point and really can’t do the song you planned to sing?
At the 55 Bar, it’s loose and I just choose the songs I want to do in the moment, as I feel them.  On a performance with a planned set list, if I realize that I can’t do the song that was planned, I’ll  choose a different song -- I have alternates ready and available, in case I want (or need) to switch gears. This is not necessarily just for emotional reasons. The voice is a tricky, delicate instrument. There are times when no matter how well you practice and keep in shape, there are just some songs you won’t tackle if you feel your voice can’t handle it on that day.

On “So Far Away,” Billy Drewes is amazing, is that clarinet? It sounds like a flute, so hollow with a lovely vibrato.
That’s clarinet you’re hearing there.  Billy is so talented, a multi-instrumentalist who plays so many wind instruments, but only three [tenor and soprano sax, and clarinet] on this record. He’s such a colorist! Everyone in my band is a colorist! I approach music as sound painting, so I look for those who do, like Ben Monder [guitar] with all his different effects.

Billy and I are listening to each other, and when we hold out a final note, there’s such a blend there. I suddenly noticed he was matching my vibrato on a gig one night – it was like there was two of me.  And I listen to him the same way he listens to me, and try to blend with him.  We’re improvising, so neither of us knows what note the other will hit till we get there, and I used to change my note to create harmony if I happened to end on the same note as Billy. But he doesn’t always do that and showed me that it’s OK to be in unison. Billy’s good at reminding me to just be simple. I came from there originally but as I grew as an artist, I moved away from that. It’s easy to move away from simplicity just because you can. On “So Far Away,” Billy reminded me to just be simple -- that you don’t always have to “do something with it to make it jazz.” I started out as a folk singer and there’s nothing wrong with singing a pretty tune. You don’t always have to be hip!

Kendra Shank Quartet with Billy Drewes (left), Frank Kimbrough, Kendra, Dean Johnson, Tony Moreno.
(Photo © Gene Martin)

On “Life’s Mosaic,” you use what you call an “improvised language.” It sounds more like a real language than scat, like there are some grammatical rules. Where does it come from?
For me it is very different from scat singing, it serves a different function. There are no grammatical rules, no definitive meanings to the “improvised language.” But the reason I like to improvise this way is that it is as if I’m speaking a language that is unencumbered by limited definitions, and yet it carries the power of intention. I can express feelings that can’t be expressed in a known language...as if feelings had their own language. Someone asked if it was like “singing in tongues” because it’s like the soul’s language for expressing the inexpressible, and yet it has the feeling of intention of language. Language is limiting, which is why instrumental music is so beautiful. It can tell a story but it’s a different story to each person who hears it; it evokes whatever it evokes in you based on your life experience.

So an improvised language has more intention of telling a story than scat singing in which the syllables function mainly to carry a melodic line...Scat singing, in my view, is more like instrumental playing where the note choices and rhythmic placement are the focus (although a great instrumental solo does tell a “story”). Improvised language takes me to a place, as if I am channeling somebody, like the universal person. It feels primal, tribal, basic. It’s as if I am speaking to humanity as a whole in a language we all understand, from the core of who we all are, the source place.

I have taken this concept in my own direction but it came out of an exercise that I learned from vocal teacher Rhiannon, one of the great jazz improvisers today and an amazing master teacher. She has her own method of teaching, drawing from her work with Bobby McFerrin and her own inimitable things as well. This is an exercise from her class—to improvise in a made-up language-- and in creating that language, to vary the syllables and sounds; don’t get stuck on just one or two or it will sound like scat. In the back of your mind, you go through the letters in the alphabet to avoid getting stuck on one sound. I really connected to that approach.

On “Water From Your Spring,” did you shape the improvisation in the first section (with Rumi text) with “Beautiful Love” in mind? It’s spontaneous improv, so does it always fit with “Beautiful Love?”

I had been wanting to do improv using Rumi poems and was inspired by Jay Clayton who does a lot of things with poetry. For a 55 Bar gig, I decided to do a “free” piece with this poem, and realized it would fit well with “Beautiful Love.” So it was conceived as the two together, but it’s different every time. There is a mood parameter―if you looked at the lead sheet, you would see I’ve written, “open improv A minor―Zen Garden mood.” “Zen Garden” is the image I give the band to shape the poetry piece. Because our arrangements are open and loose and created on the spot, I provide a mood or image to give it focus. Because it’s going into a love song, I don’t want it to get into a lot of distortion or aggressive drums. I don’t give a lot of directives to this group but those are the kinds of guidelines I give.... how each musician interprets “Zen Garden” is up to them, and it comes out differently every time. 

When we were recording and Ben started with this effect on his guitar, it was more crunchy and edgy than I expected, plus he was turned way up in my head phones and sounded very aggressive at first. But I went with it to see what would happen. Even if someone left the Zen Garden, I would go with it; I trust the greater whatever it is that is moving through us all, and I know that sometimes the unexpected is the best thing; it takes you to a magical place where you never knew you would go, but it will be better than what you could’ve planned. And Ben’s choice of guitar effect turned out to be perfect when we mixed it ―so beautiful. I loved that it made the thing go in a certain direction. At one point it sounds Coltrane-ish. Our other versions have been more delicate and spacious, but this take is so cool! It sets up the song perfectly.

As I learn more about this process of creating in the moment and being in this life, the mantra I keep in the back of my head is allowing: letting go of agendas, expectations. When I do that, cool things happen.

One of the cool things that has happened lately is Kendra Shank’s Mosaic, to be released April 14th on Challenge Records. Tour schedule and more at www.kendrashank.com.