Soul's Shaw thing runs strong

Marlena Shaw

Marlena Shaw laughs when I tell her that her birthplace, Valhalla NY, was named after Wagner's Heaven. "Well, darlin', I can see I've missed my calling by about a mile," is her bemused reply.

Kirsten Flagstad she may not be, but the soul and jazz singer is a diva assoluta in her own field. And on Saturday, she appears on the Aotea stage with the biggest band in the country, the NZSO.

From the beginning, the young Shaw was spellbound by her aunt's coloratura soprano. "I remember watching every movement of her lips, but I could never get my voice that high," she says.

Her childhood included playing the Apollo and learning piano from her uncle. Any singing was just trying to make a little money for the weekend. That is, until the Playboy Club.

"Honey," she confides, "it was a glorified men's club, Bunnies and all. The whole attitude was, 'I'm here to serve you even though it's just drinks, sugar'.

"But it was a wonderful spot for up-and-comers to learn their craft. You had your opportunity to be there every night doing it in front of an audience. And it was steady money."

From the beginning, the sassy Shaw made waves. "I wrote secular lyrics for Ramsey Lewis' Wade in the Water and I remember Richard Evans saying, 'I don't think I'm gonna stand next to you when you're singing that because we don't want any lightning from heaven to come down and strike'."

Another lusty laugh and the subject shifts to her 1968 hit California Soul being used in a KFC commercial, "with a lovely black family, tablecloth, and the whole schmear".

How did a singer who started her career with the hard-hitting Woman of the Ghetto cope with such a turnaround? Shaw is relaxed about it.

"We are all quite concerned about ourselves when we are young. We also think we are going to do something to change the world.

"We are at our most naive but that's when you do your best speaking out. You haven't yet learned to be politically correct or to say the right thing at the right time.

"Even now, I look at some of my grandkids, and I know right away what they are thinking."

In her case, a highly politicised grandmother and various uncles who were "constantly bitchin' about politicians" have left their legacy.

I can almost hear her shrug when I ask about the state of the world. "It's sad and sickening. Oh please, on television, I've got to the point of changing channels. Whatever happened to cartoons? Thank God, for the most part, audiences can distinguish between the politics of certain Americans and me."

These days, Shaw enjoys the politically unruffled standards of Kern and Gershwin, although it wasn't always so. "When I was a youngster, I hated the writer of Porgy and Bess, because they always would ask me to sing Summertime and I hated the ethnicity of it. I didn't like always having to be the one to do that song.

"Now it seems my uncle had been training me for what I'm doing today. I liked doo-wop as a kid, but he told me that if I wanted to be a singer I had to learn good songs, that I could be out there singing numbers like [Shaw croons the chorus of the Midnighters' Annie Had a Baby]." Point taken.

The sass and soul comes across in buckets, even on disc. Her snappy spoken intros to songs such as Carole King's Go Away Little Boy give the numbers irony and context.

"I want the audience to feel the emotion that I'm feeling and it makes them more interested in what happens on stage. I don't lose them."

One of her snappiest raps introduces Nathan Haines' Squire for Hire, and the two will share the Town Hall stage this weekend. The Kiwi sax man is "like one of my children, and a straight-shooter, which means you never have to look behind him to see what he really means.

"And, as for all those remixes, they're a joy, I tell you," Shaw purrs. "And even more lovely for the bank account when you wrote and published the original."

For a woman who once put down what she described as "the scratchy record set", she now adores the notoriety that comes with it all.

It's hard to believe I am talking to a 63-year-old grandmother. Her recordings and this early morning conversation don't betray it.

She keeps in touch with the younger generation with dance-floor remixes and at the microphone, singing with high-school big bands, where youngsters can "experience the camaraderie of music, getting together a group, produce wonderful sounds and bring joy to people".

Regrets seem to be few, although her hometown Las Vegas isn't what it used to be. "Every little community once had its own character," she says. "Now you have the developers and people like to pretend they're very, very safe and, if they've got more money, they can be even safer by living behind some gate."

I swear I can detect a sly smile over the phone line. "I try to tell them that robbers can climb."

* The Sass and Soul of Marlena Shaw, with the NZSO at the Aotea Centre, Sat Dec 3 8pm