Home » Jazz Articles » Interview » Lorraine Feather: The Girl With the Lazy Eye
Lorraine Feather: The Girl With the Lazy Eye
Dick Hyman
pianob.1927
"Figuring out how to work the name in took me longer than the entire rest of the song, but I'm glad I was able to," commented Feather. Soon after a critic's recent admiring mention of it, an obviously pleased Hyman showed the review to the now-bedridden Dushka and proudly played her the new song. The karmic wheel that had gone around was swinging around again.
In the hands of this black belt word nerd, a fictionalized Dushka becomes the mischievous landlady to a squabbling Scrabble player and her boyfriend while Stravinsky's darkly comic ballet is playing in the background:
Though his body isn't awfully sturdy,
And his manner is incredibly nerdy,
Conversation often overly wordy,
He's a heck of a brain.
Monday night we played our landlady Dushka,
While we listened to the score of Petrouchka;
Dushka put a double "o" in "babushka."
You could see his pain.
It was just a joke that sank like lead!
She's been known to mess with his head.
Lorraine Feather clearly understands Shakespeare's somewhat snide commentary that all the world's a stage, and the men and women—including herself—its players. She engages the lyricist's craft as an activity integral to the living of life. It is not a case of life imitating or being imitated by art, because art is itself a vitally important and indistinguishable part of it. Throughout the new compositions on Ages it is obvious that, despite her developed abilities as an observer, she is on some level involved in her characters' lives, delighting in their triumphs and feeling the sting of their losses. As they shuffle on and off this treacherous coil, their tumultuous exits and entrances, their loves, their treasons, their rambunctious joys and cherished dreams are seen through the lens of her uniquely empathic perspective on this, her most emotional, sardonic, hilariously poignant and piquant work to date.
As she did with her last CD, Language (Jazzed Media, 2008) she wrote these new pieces with contemporary composers. The lyrics are evocative and deeply imbued with her edgy trademarks: the self-referential humor, the smart-alecky jibes and the acute social commentary are all there, razor-sharp. Her rich contralto's bell-like tone, especially in the higher range, manages to drive the music with a whirlwind intensity, while her dulcet murmurs and sly intonations cut through the noise overload of modern life.
Among contemporaries, her poet's precision of language is on a level not heard since pop lyricists like
Joni Mitchell
vocalsb.1943
Randy Newman
pianob.1943
Bob Dorough
vocals1923 - 2018
Dave Frishberg
piano1933 - 2021
"Although I'm best known (though not, like, across the whole planet or anything) for my new lyrics to old music, I don't think it's an accident that my current and last CD, which were written all with the living, have been the most successful, or as [pianist/composer]
Shelly Berg
pianoAnd once again, Feather gathered the cream of the crop of L.A. and N.Y. session players for her recording. "The musicians all did more blowing on this album, which was something I wanted because they're so incredible, as well as being cool people I love being around."
The Girl with the Lazy Eye
"The Girl with the Lazy Eye" is a song on Ages that tells the story of an apparently introverted, socially inept young girl whose underachievement and awkwardness are of great concern to her teachers at school. Her lack of friends (Feather's wry lyric says: "She had a close friend one semester./ Ana's now back in Paraguay.") and her high IQ but mediocre grades, her notebooks of morbid poetry, all are embodied symbolically in her "lazy eye," a minor neuromuscular anomaly which can result in somewhat poorer vision in the eye when looking straight ahead. To accommodate it she quite often follows the eye's natural strength, and literally looks at her environment out of the corner of her eye. Feather uses this lyrically as a metaphor for not only all the mostly-misplaced concerns about the schoolgirl, but for the fact that she sees the world from a different angle and may perceive things more clearly than many of the other people in her life.Feather's eye doctor has said her own lazy eye is "not that lazy," but she says her mother "used to say 'Turn your head straight!' when I watched TV because she was afraid I wasn't strengthening the muscles by compensating when I angled my head . . . I do have a habit of turning to the left when I look at things."
All the better to see you with. Previously, on Language, she turned her perspicacious gaze on the means by which we all communicate. On Ages she has taken on the even weightier subject of mortality, her own and ours. The subtexts of aging, its harsh and humorous incongruities, and the flimsiness of the concept of time itself, course quietly just below the surface of these sparkling lyrics like a powerful underground river. "The years from 50 to 60 had been the most interesting of my life. I had released five albums and performed a lot. I thought it was a good time to do an album focusing on different stages of life as I had known it up to age 60."
But aside from the brief, oblique glance at her early life afforded by "The Girl with the Lazy Eye," there is scant mention on the recording of her earliest days growing up in New York. This and the other slightly autobiographical references scattered here and there are difficult to detect because fact, fiction and synthesized yarns are woven into the fabric of her work so seamlessly.
However, her first dozen formative years become increasingly important for the insights they provide into how this girl trained her lazy eye, for what they show about the development of an artist who climbs on and off the merry-go-round of life as observer and observed so readily.
"The very first records I really got into were by
"
data-original-title="" title="">Lambert, Hendricks & Ross [Dave Lambert
vocalsb.1917
Jon Hendricks
vocals1921 - 2017
Annie Ross
vocals1930 - 2020
Her father
Leonard Feather
b.1914Leonard Feather brought this same impetuous ardor to his work in the music world, and as a writer his liner notes, published essays and reviews numbered in the thousands. He was the first (and for a good while, virtually the only) reporter on the beat at the dawn of the Jazz Age, with the result that hundreds of musicians and other music business people knew him as a friend. He had opinions which he expressed freely. Not everyone shared them, of course, but friends or foes, everyone in New York knew him.
"It took me some years to shake off the LF's daughter thing. Not that I wasn't terribly proud of my dad, but every interview started 'So tell me some anecdotes about growing up around all of those jazz greats!' and some people still refer to me that way. At this point I don't really mind.
"Being my father's daughter brought me a certain kind of attention that was good in some ways, bad in others, and early on I was not ready for it, frankly. Some people worshiped him, others hated him. One famous jazz singer used to call and read my dad the riot act if he wrote a review of the singer's performance that was full of lavish praise and had one little caveat, like 'The medley before the intermission was not my cup of tea.'
"The flip side of people being worshipful of my dad was encountering those he had wounded, who would take me to task for things he had said. I felt bad about it, but of course we were two different people.
"It was his combination of brains, talent and emotion that worked so well together, and the fact that he came from across the pond caused him to appreciate American jazz in a particular way, also made him more painfully aware of American racism. When we moved to Los Angeles, at one point a famous musician friend was house-hunting nearby and a neighbor and local builder went from door to door telling everyone that Leonard Feather was "trying to get a nigger into the neighborhood." I was as proud of my dad's position at the NAACP as of anything. The bottom line for me is that he was a wonderful father. The fact that he and my mom brought me up in a world full of glorious musicians and fascinating artists was a gift I didn't fully appreciate until much later.
Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday and Leonard Feather
"Because
Billie Holiday
vocals1915 - 1959
"To me, jazz is the music of the holidays, a homey sound. I had no thought of being a singer until I was in my late 20s and had been struggling miserably as an aspiring actress for years, tired of waitressing at restaurants of every ethnicity in New York. That music obviously permeated my soul, though.
Jon Hendricks
vocals1921 - 2017
Annie Ross
vocals1930 - 2020
"The Ellingtons and my parents were close. Duke hired my father for Mercer Records when I was a year old and my parents had gotten badly injured in a freak automobile accident involving a driverless car that hit them while they were walking across the street. Later, Duke's sister Ruth lived down the street from us and her son Stevie and I hung out together, went to the amusement park, made popcorn and watched TV at the apartment on Riverside Drive.
"
Dizzy Gillespie
trumpet1917 - 1993
"There were many musicians I only met in passing at festivals, or when my dad was interviewing them. After we moved to L.A. my parents took me to the Monterey and Playboy festivals, and we would see their musician friends. I remember when I was in my early teens, my parents introducing me to 
Miles Davis
trumpet1926 - 1991
"My father was rather low-tech and would tape over a few of the million commercial cassettes he'd been sent, to re-use for interviews. When he died I gave all of those to the
Lionel Hampton
vibraphone1908 - 2002
Shelly Berg
pianoMiles Davis
trumpet1926 - 1991
"When we were moving from New York to Los Angeles [in 1960] my mother and I stayed at Peggy's for a time, my mom checking out the housing situation." Singer Peggy Lee and Jane Feather had known each other since the two of them shared expenses and roomed together in the early days of WWII—Lee was from North Dakota and had sung with
Benny Goodman
clarinet1909 - 1986
"Peggy had two Pekingese named Little One and Little Two, and a white rug that was like their fur. Her Christmas tree was white too. A highlight of that trip was
Frank Sinatra
vocals1915 - 1998
To the Manner Born
Once the Feathers had settled in Los Angeles, they enrolled young Lorraine in school, and a little later, in a jazz dance class, which led to a 15-year infatuation with terpsichore.
"I started taking jazz dance when I was 12. It was my mother's idea. I had no friends and I think she assumed it would be some kind of social event. It wasn't, but it completely changed me, because I was a very dorky child who couldn't stand up on skates or anything. Even though I didn't have great talent as a dancer, it helped me to kind of get outside of my own head, become active, much more fit, more confident. I learned what it was to work really hard, and mostly for art alone. Most of the dancers who were deeply serious, and did have serious talent, took class all day long, all week long, when they weren't auditioning. It's a more punishing career than acting, even, because even if you become successful the performing years are short for most. When I studied jazz dancing, often with just a conga player playing, I started to feel the groove! My first teacher was the late Carlton Johnson, who was also a Motown fanatic. Sometimes I'd play the 45 of 'Nowhere to Run,' by Martha and the Vandellas, for an hour straight in my room. My parents were tolerant.
"In ninth grade, I went to a Catholic girls' school for a year—my best friend was going there—before switching to the freewheeling world of Hollywood High. During the year at Corvallis I stepped in for an ill classmate who had been cast in the lead role for the school's production of Euripides' Electra. I only got the call because I'm good at memorizing, but was officially bitten by the acting bug by show time. I started thinking about going back to New York on my own to act, and after a couple of years at LA City College in the theatre department, got a partial scholarship to the Circle in the Square school and returned to Manhattan at 18.
"As far as music goes, I can't honestly pinpoint when I drifted back into jazz. I started to appreciate [Miles Davis'] Sketches of Spain (Columbia, 1960) and [Dizzy Gillespie's] Gillespiana (Verve, 1961) when they had been out for a while and I was in my mid-teens, and continued to play them and certain other key albums when I moved back to New York on my own and everyone my age was into Big Brother and the Holding Company. I also got my first waitressing job at the Village Gate then, so I heard artists like
Nina Simone
piano and vocals1933 - 2003
Mose Allison
piano and vocals1927 - 2016
Bill Evans
piano1929 - 1980
Toshiko Akiyoshi
pianob.1929
Horace Silver
piano1928 - 2014
The Beatles
band / ensemble / orchestraBut Feather had returned to New York to pursue stage acting, not dance.
"When I studied acting at the H.B. Studio in New York, I found that I did have something of a gift for it. I learned what it was like to be 'in the zone,' when something else takes over. It's not dissimilar to performing a song. I also read many plays, and getting to know some of the great playwrights that way was exciting, the beauty of their words.
"I used to practice singing a song or two for theatre chorus auditions in New York. My then-boyfriend, who was a musician, told me that he thought I had a certain je ne sais quoi and ought to think about being a singer. I auditioned for a group called Farmer Brown, a jazz/rock band that had a gig at the Village Gate. Later I did club gigs in the Bronx, the Jersey Shore, Pennsylvania. It took me quite a while to get good, to feel comfortable singing on stage—and later still, to get comfortable in the studio. In those days, the main thing I had to offer was my ability to learn countless Top 40 songs in record time."
One of her early singing/acting jobs was fortuitous and kept her rent paid for some time. "I was in [Jesus Christ] Superstar on the road, then a year on Broadway till it closed—running around in the two-piece loincloth, waving the palm frond, making like a leper... For one scene, there were headdresses so heavy that you had to hold your head super-straight for fear your neck would snap if you tilted it too far. We got hazard pay because the stage opened and closed. There were three women who came down in a giant butterfly to sing 'Jesus Christ, Superstar' at the end of the show, and if any of the three were out sick, I got to be one of them. Those were wild days and it was terrific to be employed, plus New York State was giving out a lot of unemployment benefit extensions in those days, so the show supported me for years."
Looking for ways to make grocery money during these lean times, she began landing singing gigs here and there, like with pop singer Petula Clark.
"The Petula gig was only for a couple of weeks but. . . it was glamorous and fun. The other two singers and I were given cool outfits, there was a great orchestra, I was excited to be in Vegas and making money. Petula was sweet. The other singers were Margaret Dorn, a very talented singer who still lives in New York, and my later-to-be-best-girlfriend Linda Lawley, who is no longer with us. I wrote the lyrics for "Two Desperate Women" [on the Ages CD] about her, again with some exaggerations and fiction thrown in. The only scary thing about the Petula gig was that there was some misconception about my sight-reading, which borders on the nonexistent. I got by, lagging a microsecond behind the other two.
"I also toured with Grand Funk Railroad. Shortly after I met Tony [drummer Tony Morales, Feather's husband since 1983] he came across a picture of me in a rock magazine called Circus, dancing behind GFR in a leotard, net pantyhose and a multicolored Afro wig. But I had gone to New York to act and I was only hired as a singer/dancer, when I worked at all."
These hungry years in New York are the subject of one of the hardest swinging tunes on Ages, "Old at 18/Dog Bowl," written with Eddie Arkin and inspired by her years as a struggling actress. Opening with a groove that her husband Tony began playing one day on a metal dog bowl, the cold predawn atmosphere in an actress' small Manhattan walk-up is captured in all its chilly pathos and wistful glory.
The Lyricist
"I had written a few lyrics in my late 20s, but the first serious writing I did was when I got hired for the vocal trio Full Swing. It was me, Steve March [
Mel Torme
vocals1925 - 1999
From Left: Steve March, Lorraine Feather, Charlotte ("Charlo") Crossley
The first recording the group did was called Swing (1982) for Perry's record label, Planet Records, then later reissued as The Good Times Are Back. "Richard wanted us to record a song that was an instrumental written by composer/tenor saxophonist
Tommy Newsom
saxophone1929 - 2007
Horace Henderson
b.1904"What was significant about that experience for me was that writing words to fast, tricky music with a lot of syncopations came to me more easily than anything else I had ever tried to do. I find fault with some of the writing I did back then—for one thing, I believe in the perfect rhyme now for that kind of song—but it came so naturally, and I didn't discover it till I was in my early 30s. It was also my first experience flinging myself into creating words for a song and having to get it approved, getting shot down and doing it all over again. I've done a lot of lyrics for animation, much of it with Mark Watters, and a lot of rewriting. Sometimes you do take it personally, but experience teaches you there's always another idea."
Full Swing meant performing work, including tours of Japan and Brazil, a TV special with Barry Manilow, and appearances at the Monterey and Playboy Jazz Festivals, along with two more albums: In Full Swing (Cypress,1987) and End of the Sky (Cypress,1989)—unfortunately, now out of print.
From Left: Charlo Crossley, Lorraine Feather, Bette Midler, Augie Johnson
Though not Full Swing's creator, as the only original member from beginning to end, Feather was the de facto curator for a band that a employed an impressive array of musical talent, including
Grant Geissman
guitarb.1953
Russ Freeman
piano1926 - 2002
David Benoit
pianob.1953
"So that group went on in different forms for eight years and did two more albums. I wrote lyrics for a lot of material the group sang and recorded, including two Ellington pieces. My parents loved bebop... I appreciated it but it was and is kind of over my head. Lyrically speaking, I gravitated more toward pre-bop when it came to tackling existing material. I liked music you could dance to."
The Collaborationist
First and foremost Lorraine Feather is a lyricist, a writer. She is also a gifted singer who has continued to develop her considerable natural skills over the years.But as a lyricist and singer who relies on musical composers, she has had to master a third and very difficult skill, which, because it is so all-encompassing, is quite invisible: she is one of the music world's most accomplished practitioners of the delicate act of collaboration. Her embrace of this fine art is key to understanding the artist. Even the most educated of listeners is only vaguely cognizant that it is
Ira Gershwin
composer / conductor1896 - 1983
The Body Remembers (Bean Bag, 1997) is a solo album that was a collaboration with several composers, principally Feather's husband, drummer/producer Tony Morales. "[It] was essentially conceived in Tony's studio in our first, wee home in La Crescenta [California] on our old 4-track machine. It's dated now because of all the electronics, but it was a blast to do. 'Five' was based on a weird sliding thing Tony's old BassMan bass machine started doing when the batteries were wearing out. He made it into a groove. I don't overdub my own voice anymore because it's not often appropriate on an acoustic jazz recording, but I did it a lot on that CD and I love doing it.
Janis Siegel
vocalsb.1952
"I also worked with
Don Grusin
pianob.1941
Rod Stewart
vocalsb.1945
Patti Austin
vocalsb.1948
Feather Composer/Collaborators, From Left: Dick Hyman Eddie Arkin, Russell Ferrante
"In 1999, five years after my dad passed away, I was going through some CDs with my mom and borrowed
Fats Waller
piano1904 - 1943
During the writing period, Mike Lang worked with me in L.A. As well as being a fine, fine player, he knows a lot about jazz history and helped me expand my knowledge of the Fats repertoire— did hip arrangements of 'Blue Black Bottom' ("Too Good Lookin"), 'Viper's Drag' ("Timeless Rag") and 'Numb Fumblin' ("In Living Black and White").
"I remember, vividly, the first time Dick Hyman played Fats Waller's 'The Minor Drag' for me, in David Abell's piano store. I thought it was the most entertaining piece of music I'd ever heard." So inspired was she, that it became "You're Outa Here," the opening track on New York City Drag (Rhombus, 2001), her CD of Waller pieces for which she daringly wrote the classic tunes' first-ever lyrics. As it turned out, this collaborative album with Hyman and Mike Lang (and Waller) was a watershed moment in her career.
Finding Her Artistic Voice
With Café Society (Sanctuary, 2003) Lorraine Feather strikes just the right nostalgic note for the listener, providing a wistful introduction (or re-introduction, as the case may be) to the world of 1945 Greenwich Village, where the basement at 1 Sheridan Square housed the historically famous nightclub Café Society Downtown and the top floor was the apartment home of her newlywed parents. She creates a rare kind of intimacy for her listener that is only possible because of its authenticity. Her lovingly written musical paeans and revivifying lyrical treatments of a pair of tunes written by Duke Ellington, and one each by
Johnny Mandel
arrangerb.1925
Lester Young
saxophone1909 - 1959
Ella Fitzgerald
vocals1917 - 1996
Art Tatum
piano1909 - 1956
"Café Society... was mostly all-original. Some of the highlights were working with Russ for the first time on the title track, doing my own version of Eddie's and my song 'Big Fun,' that Barry Manilow had recorded on the Swing Street (BMG, 1987) album Eddie worked with him on; my own version of 'Jungle Rhythm' from The Jungle Book 2.
Paul Grabowsky
pianob.1958
A year later Feather went all-in once more with an entire album of lyrical treatments to Duke Ellington tunes (save one nugget written by her father and recorded by Duke) entitled Such Sweet Thunder (Sanctuary, 2004).
"I love Ellington's music, Strayhorn's. Many of my favorite pieces were written in the 30s. I had done three Ellington pieces for Café Society and met " data-original-title="" title="">Bill Elliott, who is a stellar big band arranger. I decided to do a whole Ellington album with Bill arranging and it was a thrill from beginning to end, except for the legal hassles. Doing these adaptations of old tunes is a real can of worms, or slippery slope, or Pandora's Box, I'm not sure which to choose... but it's fraught with peril. You have to show the publishers what you're doing before they agree, and by that time you've already invested time and money. At the last minute, one of the publishers for three pieces I wanted to use, decided not to give the okay because
Norah Jones
pianob.1979
"I do feel I have a deeper appreciation of these composers' work, having delved into it as I did. It was good for me as a singer and lyricist, good for my ears to learn the music more intimately, and good for my soul to have the privilege of connecting with what these compositions had to say, and keep saying, as they are performed all over the world every day. I took the liberty of writing whatever came naturally to me without regard for period. Once when I was performing 'You're Outa Here' in New York, a musician pulled me aside after a run-through to hip me to the fact that there were no 501 jeans during Fats Waller's lifetime,"
Significantly, somewhat ironically perhaps, her collaborationist's efforts with these composer's ghosts and their classic recordings were helping her to find her own artistic voice.
Stride pianist Fats Waller inscribed this photo of himself with the words, "To Leonard Feather, you 'swell' person. Oh! What a change you have made in life! May God bless you and your days without end. Sincerely, 'Fats' Waller"
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Lorraine Feather
Interview
Carl L. Hager
Michael Bloom Media Relations
United States
Dick Hyman
Joni Mitchell
Randy Newman
Bob Dorough
Dave Frishberg
Shelly Berg
Lambert, Hendricks & Ross
Dave Lambert
Jon Hendricks
Annie Ross
Leonard Feather
Billie Holiday
Dizzy Gillespie
Miles Davis
Lionel Hampton
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Ira Gershwin
Janis Siegel
Don Grusin
Rod Stewart
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Ella Fitzgerald
Art Tatum
Paul Grabowsky
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Manhattan Transfer
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