Diane Schuur wants to wrap up Taiwan in a big "Deedles" hug and help make it better with the healing power of her music. Welcome to the comfort zone.
"Please call me `Deeds,' it's short for `Deedles. All my friends call me Deeds." Even in a telephone interview from the US, Schuur talks in a familiar manner and confides easily. Later in the conversation she will ask if her husband can join in on another line, "So we can all chat and be friends."
Her stage performances are of a similar stripe. She is relaxed, chatty and full of anecdotes. Her intention is to put us in touch with the love vibration -- "The highest vibration that we can be aware of, something more than we are."
Some sing because they like it, some for money, others for fame, but this lady is doing it "because music is my life." It's a statement that is easy to believe and is repeated like a mantra.
"We can become so centered on ourselves that we don't explore the god and the music within ourselves," she says.
Schuur was born blind (premature birth and incubator accident) in Tacoma, Washington. She started playing the piano and singing at about the age of three and at nine years old held her first performance in Tacoma at a Holiday Inn. She recorded her first single for Decca, Dear Mommy and Daddy, in high school.
Later, with help from her teacher and pianist Jimmy Wakely, she immersed herself in the world of jazz, which is pretty much where she has been ever since.
She earned her jazz credentials the hard way, gigging in bars and clubs throughout the Northwest. It was not long, however, before she got noticed and this led to a slot at the Monterey Jazz Festival, where she was "discovered" by Stan Getz and soon after released her first album, Pilot of my Destiny.
Then, she experienced the first flushes of popular success with a slew of album releases and invitations to the White House to sing for Ron and Nancy Reagan. Johnny Carson loved her and in the meantime she recorded with the Count Basie Orchestra and mainstream megastars like Barry Manilow and Stevie Wonder, whose song I just called to say I love you she will likely sing on one of the three nights she performs in Taipei, starting tomorrow.
Everyone knows the tune -- but she gives this popular favorite a personal flavor. She glides and swoops through the melody and scat sings and extemporizes through the rest. She has a rare, even athletic set of vocal chords and can change tempo and mood at will.
Compared to Vanessa Rubin or Diana Krall -- two other chanteuses in the Ella Fitzgerald/Dinah Washington mold -- Schuur is perhaps the more wide-ranging. Critics might say that the way she covers a song can be more sugar than booze, more country than blues. But, this is her audience too, an eclectic lot who are readily entertained with the familiar.
She has toured around the world and will do a couple of dates in South Korea after she finishes in Taiwan. The last time she visited the country was in 1988, from which she remembers the smell of cooking in the streets and the audience understanding most of her jokes.
She is looking forward to buying some things for her computer, sorting out her MP3 player, and the sounds and smells of a foreign country. That and spreading the word, with a tune attached.
She says, "There has to be a certain interplay with the audience. It's like falling in love with someone, sometimes. It's surprising how often you can fall in love if you let it happen, even in one day."
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