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A song on her lips, laughter in her heart
Judith Owen is a jazz singer with a sense of humor

Thursday, September 14, 2006

By Keith Spera
Music writer

Pianist and singer Judith Owen signs off her new CD, "Here," with a lovely, bittersweet lullaby called "I'll Watch You (While You're Sleeping)."

"I bless the world for bringing you into my empty life," she sings tenderly. "Until the day you leave me, and I know one day you will / I'll take such good care of you, I'll guard you when you're ill / For time is sadly fleeting and life must not stand still / So til then I'll watch you while you're sleeping."

She could be serenading a child. But the object of Owen's affection is Victor, her beloved 13-year-old Labrador-husky hybrid. Her melancholy stems from the knowledge that one day, Victor will be gone.

"As a childless woman who is on the road constantly, he is my baby," Owen said Monday from West Virginia, where she appeared on the syndicated radio show "Mountain Stage." "My life is ruled by my dog. He's been a true friend to me. As he nears the end of his life . . . I'm going to enjoy every day that I have with him."

Treasuring life's best moments, however brief, is a common theme throughout "Here," Owen's most polished recording to date. She is the Tori Amos of the jazz cabaret set, an evocative singer with a soaring soprano who leavens her carefully calibrated emotional set pieces with a wickedly sharp sense of humor.

She'll showcase much of "Here" tonight during an early evening show at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, a rare performance in her adopted hometown.

The Welsh-born Owen and her husband, humorist and "Spinal Tap" bassist Harry Shearer, split their time between Santa Monica, Calif., and a French Quarter condo. She hopes New Orleanians do not perceive her as a "dreadful Brit who breezes in and out and thinks it's all marvelous and fun," as her love affair with the city dates to childhood.

"I didn't realize all the music my father was listening to was from New Orleans," Owen said. "Then when I first came down with Harry, it was like, my God, this is incredible. For somebody who wants history and eccentrics and character and weirdness and fun and darkness and drama . . . where else is there in America that would have all of that?"

That New Orleans music emphasizes the piano, not the guitar, also struck her. "In the land of guitars, the piano town is king," she said. "If you're obsessed with the piano like I am, then it's a beautiful thing."

She and Shearer mourned the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina and the levee failures. Grief has given way to outrage over the recovery's slow pace and the media's short attention span. During a month-long tour of Britain this summer, the couple pointedly emphasized the man-made nature of the disaster in interviews and onstage.

"Harry was absolutely burning over it," Owen said. "What can you do when your own country is quite happy to pretend it's gone away? You use the powers that you have to pass that message along and get people to be aware of what really happened, and not propagate the myths."

Owen started recording "Here" before Katrina with producer John Fischbach; she returned after the storm to finish at Piety Street Studio in Bywater.

Several tracks have taken on fresh meaning post-Katrina. Popular local radio host Garland Robinette has featured "Hand Across the Water" -- a song Owen wrote about "the difference that one human being calling another can make in bringing them back from the edge of utter loneliness" -- in his broadcasts.

She did not intend "Here" to be a concept album -- "that's a bit '70s and nauseating" -- but readily admits that most songs do revolve around a single idea: living in the moment, however difficult that moment may be.

"I realized in retrospect that every song is about the desire to live in the present, to be present, because that's all we have," she said. "Living in the past is not living. Planning constantly for the future is not living either; it's just frittering away your life. The hardest thing is to just be in the moment.

"The noise in one's head, the argument that goes on with yourself, the sadness, the looking back, the if onlys, what ifs . . . all those things are particularly strong in someone like me, who is a dark, mood-swinging person. They rule your life. It stops you from being in the here and now, and that's being alive."

"Here" occasionally feels like a breakup album, and in a sense it is.
"The breakup is with me," Owen said. "The breakup that I'm singing about is with the old me, the old me that only lived in sadness and depression and pain and looking back all the time.

"This record is about looking at yourself square in the face and knowing who you are, who you were, why you made the choices you made, and looking at yourself with the same compassion that you have for any other human being. The hardest thing is to have compassion for yourself, to accept what you are. It's much easier to beat yourself up constantly."

Even her delicious cabaret cover of Survivor's "Eye of the Tiger" conforms to the theme. The song was, after all, on the soundtrack of "Rocky III" -- and woe be the prizefighter not focused on the present.

Owen has similarly transformed other classic rock anthems, most notably Deep Purple's "Smoke on the Water," Soundgarden's "Black Hole Sun" and Spinal Tap's "Christmas With the Devil."

"The higher the testosterone of a song, the more codpiece and rock god it is, the more I want to make it a sexy, female thing," she said. "That is my humor coming through."

Her Survivor moment aside, "Here" is noticeably free of irony. But her humor sparkles onstage, as she peppers between-song banter with anecdotes and associations framed in her enduring Welsh accent.

"I spend a lot of time making people laugh between songs. People who are funny and who need humor tend to be the darkest people in the history of mankind. I can say that because I'm surrounded by professionally funny people.

"Moody bastards like me tend to rely very heavily upon humor," she said, "because it is the flip-side of darkness. No surprises why I'm (married to) a very funny man. No surprises why I use it so much in between songs: because I need the relief."

Like Mardi Gras or theatrical masks, she recognizes life's inherent dichotomy of joy and sadness.

"The songs are very much who I am as a human being," she said. "Believing that life is beautiful and awful at the same moment is who I am, because I know it to be the truth. Because I am dreadful and wonderful at the same time myself.

"A woman came up to me last night and said the thing that I love to hear the most: 'One minute I was laughing, and then I cried, and then I was laughing again.' That's exactly why I'm doing this. I've never been afraid of extreme emotions."

The only more satisfying reaction, perhaps, is that of Victor, her dog and occasional muse. He nestles his head against the piano's foot pedals whenever she plays at home.

"He sleeps like a baby," she said, laughing. "I take that as a compliment. I refuse to take it any other way."

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Music writer Keith Spera can be reached at kspera@timespicayune.com or (504) 826-3470.