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Suede for One Night Only at the Jazz Festival

By Kahrin Deines
August 6th, 2007

When Suede was in sixth grade, the school’s band director came to her class and invited students to audition. He told her she could play anything, but when she asked for the French horn, he said it was taken. And when she asked for the drums, he said they were accounted for as well. So, she asked him what he would like her to play and he paired her with a trumpet. It may have been simply a coupling of necessity on his part, but it’s possible he knew what he was doing because Suede, now a diva of vocal renown, discovered a natural simpatico between her voice and the trumpet.

“I sing through my trumpet, which is not how most people do it,” says Suede. “And when I’m scatting, I scat like a horn player.” Indeed, Suede moves between the two in one song with spectacular ease. Not that the trumpet’s brassy blow sets the limits of what this lady can do with her voice. She can go from growl to liquid smooth in a swinging second and musical genres lay down their boundaries in the wake of her alto.

She describes herself as a cross between Ella Fitzgerald and Bette Midler with a dash of Louis Armstrong, but really Suede is her own soaring thing and hers is a vocal acrobatics that you can see on only one night this summer in Provincetown when she performs on August 11 as part of the 3rd Annual Provincetown Jazz Festival.

Suede has chosen to perform only once this summer in order to give her maximum support to the festival. “It’s something I did last year, too, in the hopes of supporting the Jazz Festival fully, so people wouldn’t have to choose between performances,” says Suede.

Suede has been performing in Provincetown since 1985, singing everything from folk to rock and pop, but jazz and the blues have always been her marrow and she loves to see the Cape’s jazz community come together. “I moved to the Cape eleven years ago and from the beginning I knew there was this jazz community, but I traveled so much I didn’t have a chance to really be a part of it. Bart Weisman (the producer of the festival) has been a hub for the jazz community Cape-wide. It’s a real treat for me and everyone else to gather together.”

And, it should be added, for the Jazz Festival’s audiences as well – besides her talent as a vocalist and song stylist, Suede is famous for radiating a powerful energy at her performances. “My voice is absolutely my first instrument, but I’m also an entertainer, absolutely an entertainer. I’m so passionate about what I get to do with a live audience that it lights me up and the audience lights up and we feed off each other,” says Suede.

At the festival, Suede will perform some songs that fans can expect to hear soon on a new album called “Dangerous Mood.” “The name itself is great fun,” says Suede. “It’s going to be a mix of standards and originals written for me by an amazing team of contemporary songwriters.” Suede will start the studio work for the album in September and she hopes to release it by the holidays. “It’s kind of pushing it,” she says. “But have you met me?”