[music]

Alison Stewart: This is All of It. I'm Alison Stewart, live from the WNYC studios in Soho. Thank you for spending part of your day with us on today's show. Author Julia Phillips will be here to talk about her new novel Bear which the New York Times calls, 'a moody and affecting slow burn.' Later on, we'll talk about romance rekindled with Atlantic writer Faith Hill, whose piece was called What Second Chance Couples Can Share About Love. Listeners get ready to call in and share why you're glad you got back with your ex. In a new film called The Wasp, about a woman who plots revenge on her cheating husband only for the plot to unravel, we'll talk with the stars Natalie Dormer and Naomi Harris. They'll join us to talk about the film. That's all coming up. To get things started, we start with some music from award-winning vocalist Catherine Russell.

[MUSIC -- Richard Whiting: My Ideal]

Catherine Russell: Will I ever find the man in my mind,

the one who is my ideal?

Maybe he's a dream and yet he might be

just around the corner waiting for me.

Will I recognize the light in his eyes

that no other eyes reveal?

Or will I pass him by and never even know

that he was my ideal.

Alison Stewart: Idea that was My Ideal, the title track from Kathryn Russell's new album, released over the weekend. You'll recognize that song as a classic standard of the American songbook, which Russell knows well. To listen to Catherine's singing is also to get a history lesson on the early pioneers of ragtime and jazz. On this album, recorded as a duet with pianist Sean Mason, we hear Russell's interpretations of songs written by composers like Irving Berlin, James P. Johnson, Spencer Williams and Ray Charles. My Ideal is out now, and we also want to let you know that Catherine Russel's performing at Birdland from September 3 to September 7, and we welcome her to the studio. Hi, Catherine.

Catherine Russell: Hi.

Alison Stewart: Let's start with the title track we just heard in the intro, My Ideal, a classic song. What do you hear in this composition that made you want to put your own spin on it?

Catherine Russell: It just reminded me of how many years I spent by myself looking for my soulmate and just thinking, "Will I find this person?" I spent a lot of years thinking about that. When I heard the song-- actually, one of my students brought the song into a class- and I thought, "That's a good song. Do you mind if I borrow that?" Richard Whiting is such a wonderful writer, so I adopted it.

Alison Stewart: The pianist on this album is Sean Mason, who was just 25 when you recorded the album together.

Catherine Russell: Yes.

Alison Stewart: How did you first meet Sean?

Catherine Russell: Sean and I were on a couple of programs at Jazz at Lincoln Center. The first one was a New Orleans themed program with New Orleans artists, and Sean was the piano player on that. They have a family show series, so we found ourselves on that program-- actually, during the pandemic- so it was a virtual program. Then I asked him to work with me. He joined my band for a little over a year, and we went all over the world. Then I asked him, I said, "Do you think it would?" because I knew he had his own debut album coming out. I said, "What do you think about recording with me?" and he said, yes.

Alison Stewart: Aw. When you first heard him play, what made you think "I'd like to record with this gentleman?"

Catherine Russell: Well, Sean, he composes in the present. He's very much in the moment, and so he just continually creates while you're listening to him. It's like the science lab. He just puts the music in there and mixes it up and comes out with something different every time, which is his own. He's influenced by many, many styles and many classic styles and also modern styles all at the same time, so you never know. He's rhythmic and his wonderful harmonic sense, so it just brings something else out in me. I just love working with him, as I say because it just brings me out.

Alison Stewart: Yes. I was going to ask. You sung with big bands and on this, it's just you and the piano played by Sean Mason. What did you notice about your singing when you're playing just with piano?

Catherine Russell: Well, it's very exposing, so there's no place to hide, really. Not that I want to hide.

Alison Stewart: I know what you mean.

Catherine Russell: It's freer in one sense because you can just basically do what you want with the other person in the moment. We pretty much found everything we found right in the recording studio. I think we had one rehearsal, but basically we said, "No, we don't want to over-rehearse."

Alison Stewart: Oh, just one?

Catherine Russell: Yes, we got together one time, I picked the tunes and then he said, "Well, okay. Don't write me any music charts. I'm just going to learn these tunes." Then he came in having arranged everything and just knowing everything from his heart. That was really unique, and so we basically did the album in a couple of days.

Alison Stewart: What does something that Sean's playing brought out in your voice?

Catherine Russell: I don't know. I feel like I get deeper in the lyric maybe. I get deeper in the story because that's the most important thing to me. Deeper in the story and deeper in the natural rhythm and flavor of whatever we're doing. The Ray Charles flavor is different, obviously, than the classic American songbook flavor. Maybe there's a little more church influence in the Ray Charles flavor, a little more soul influence, so he knows all about that. He brings that out, and I'm able to create with him in the moment.

Alison Stewart: We've gotten texts about you. We haven't even given out the phone number. Kat Russell, about five exclamation points. "A shout-out for a Bronx gal. I'm always happy to hear you." Another text we got, "We love Catherine Russell. Have seen her many times. She does her parents proud."

Catherine Russell: Thank you so much.

Alison Stewart: We'll talk about your parents in just a minute. Right now, we're speaking with Catherine Russell about her new album, My Ideal. She is playing at Birdland Jazz Club on September 3 through September 7. Let's get into another song now from My Ideal. We're going to play a Porter's Love Song to a Chambermaid, first song on the album. Why was this the first?

Catherine Russell: We spend a lot of time sequencing. That's basically my partner and my husband who does all the sequencing, and he'll run it by me, but his sequencing sense is really great, so I'm really glad he chose this to open it.

Alison Stewart: Let's listen to Porter's love song.

[MUSIC -- Cole Porter: Love Song to a Chambermaid]

Catherine Russell: Though my position's considered low degree,

some fellow travelers may look down on me.

I'll go smiling through long as I have you.

I am the happiest of troubadours

thinking of you while I'm massaging floors.

In my leisure time I made up this rhyme.

I will be your oil mop, you could be the oil

so we both could mingle every time we toil.

I would be your dustpan if you could be my broom.

We could work together all around the room.

And daddy, I would be your shoe brush

if you would be my shoe.

Then I could keep you bright, dear,

shining just like new.

I would be your razor.

Alison Stewart: That's Catherine Russell singing Porter's Love Song to a Chambermaid. I love that you just take on the main character in your songs. Like you have something going on, like, "I'm going to tell you a little bit of something."

Catherine Russell: This song actually was introduced to me by Michael Feinstein. Then I started to learn more about it, and nobody's really doing this tune. It was from a Kitchen Mechanics review in honor of service workers in Harlem back in the Depression era, back in the 1930s. Andy Rozaf is such a great lyricist who wrote so many great tunes, also with Fats Waller. He wrote this with James P. Johnson. Sean does such a great thing of honoring James P. Johnson's style in this tune, and it's just so wonderfully written. Actually, I went between the Ethel Waters version and the Fats Waller version of this. I just thought to make a love song out of cleaning is really beautiful.

Alison Stewart: I know, and make it for people who were working at the time, and had jobs at the time, but I have time for love as well.

Catherine Russell: Yes, yes, yes.

Alison Stewart: You also have Fats Waller on the album, You Stayed Away Too Long.

Catherine Russell: Yes.

Alison Stewart: When you think about that Fats Waller what feeling do you get from his music as a listener, and then what feeling do you get when you perform it?

Catherine Russell: He was a great storyteller. Whether he wrote the song or not, he owns it, and so that's what I get from him. I get also a real the way life is. The way life really is, it can be happy and sad at the same time. He gets the humor out of it, yet it can be a sad subject, like this example. I like to bring that. I like to know how to live through the material. When I hear Fats Waller, I just feel like he was always living and working things out through the material.

Alison Stewart: We're going to hear a song of Ray Charles. You like Ray Charles, I take it.

Catherine Russell: I love Ray Charles.

Alison Stewart: Tell me how much you love Ray Charles.

Catherine Russell: I love Ray Charles. The genius of Ray Charles. I got to hear him, actually.

Alison Stewart: Did you really?

Catherine Russell: Yes, I got to hear him. I guess it was back, maybe in the early '90s, out at Jones Beach. I tell you, to hear that man live, nothing like that. He just incorporated everything, blues, gospel, just church, jazz, everything all at the same time and mastered that. It was phenomenal to hear him.

Alison Stewart: What are we going to hear when we hear Ain't That Love? That's our next track.

Catherine Russell: Oh, do you want me to answer that?

Alison Stewart: Yes, please.

Catherine Russell: Just joy. I'm so happy to be in love with life and just with music and to know that somebody wrote it down.

Alison Stewart: Here's Ain't That Love?

[MUSIC -- Ray Charles: Ain't That Love]

Catherine Russell: Now, baby when you sigh

I wanna sigh with you

A when you cry

I wanna cry some, too.

Now, ain't that love?

Oh, ain't that love that I feel

In my heart for you.

When your friends

Turn their back on you

I'll be here

Just to see you through.

Now, ain't that love?

Ain't that love?

Ain't that love? Oh, now

Ain't that love? Baby

That I feel in my heart for you.

Now when your friends

turn their back on you,

I'll be there

just to see you through.

Now, ain't that love?

Ain't that love?

Ain't that love? Oh

Ain't that love?

Ain't that love, baby,

That I feel in my heart for you.

Now when you walk

I wanna walk with you

And when you talk

Wanna talk some, too.

Ain't that love?

Oh, ain't that love that I feel

In my heart for you.

Now if you ever

If you ever need a friend

I'll be with you

Yes, until the end.

Now ain't that love?

Say it again,

Ain't that love.

Oh, oh, oh.

Ain't that love, baby

that I feel in my heart for you?

Alison Stewart: My guest is Catherine Russell. We're listening to tracks off her new album, My Ideal. We'll have more with Catherine after a quick break. This is All of It.

[music]

Alison Stewart: You are listening to All of It on WNYC, I'm Alison Stewart. We're speaking with Catherine Russell about her new album, my Ideal. Catherine is also performing at Birdland Jazz Club from September 3 through the 7th. Before you started on your solo career, you made a successful career out of being a background singer. You sang for Bowie, Steely Dan, Cyndi Lauper, Paul Simon, just to name of a few folks. How did you learn how to use your vocals in supporting so many different kinds of acts?

Catherine Russell: It's all of those artists, I was a fan of all of their music before I got a chance to work with all of them. Jackson Brown, everybody, Roseanne Cash, and they are all great writers and great song interpreters, great performers. It's just a matter of "How do I support their music? How do I support the music in a way that makes them comfortable?" That is my job as a backup singer. How do I blend? How do I sing underneath them? How do I sing with a vibrato that matches theirs? All of that type of thing so that my voice doesn't stick out, so that it's just supporting the music. That's really my philosophy. I want them to be comfortable working with me.

Alison Stewart: Let's take David Bowie as an example. How did you meet Bowie?

Catherine Russell: Gail Ann Dorsey, who was David Bowie's bass player and backup singer for 20 years or something like that, called me. We had worked with an artist named Jane Sibery, Canadian artist.

Alison Stewart: I love Jane Sibery.

Catherine Russell: Yes, great. I met Gail doing that gig. Then when Mr. Bowie was looking for another backup singer and somebody that could play parts on keyboards and different instruments, Gail called me and said, "You might be good for this." He asked her who she would trust, and she called me. I said, "Well, that's great." That's how I met him. I met him for the first time at the first rehearsal of the band. When I got the gig, I couldn't believe it was David Bowie. When he walked into the rehearsal studio and he came over to me and he said, "Thank you for doing this," I almost fell over. I said, "Thank me? Thank you, my goodness." Yes, and he was fantastic to work with.

Alison Stewart: Eventually, you decided to start a solo career. What went into that decision? You could have been a backup singer forever, which is a great gig, by the way.

Catherine Russell: Yes, it is.

Alison Stewart: You decide to go solo?

Catherine Russell: Well, after we came home from David Bowie's last world tour, which was 2004, my fiance then at the time said, "You know, there's one thing you haven't done, which is make your own recordings and I think this is the time to do it." I said, "No, wait. I don't know about this." Then he said, "Look, just give me 12,14 tunes you like. I got a friend out in the Chicago area. We're going to go out there and make a record." That turned into my first album, Cat.

Alison Stewart: Wow.

Catherine Russell: Yes.

Alison Stewart: Were you scared?

Catherine Russell: Yes.

Alison Stewart: What were you scared of?

Catherine Russell: Everything. Like, now I got to make all the decisions because I had watched bandleaders for so many years. I thought, "Gee, now everybody's going to be asking me what to do, and I don't know what to do." Then it was kind of like, "How do I do a whole show as a leader, in the front? What do I say to the people and what do I do? How do I dress?" From just working and working and working and working and just doing it over and over and over, I learned how to just be more comfortable with myself. Took some time, though.

Alison Stewart: I have to imagine you took something from home, a little bit from your parents.

Catherine Russell: Oh, yes.

Alison Stewart: For people who don't know, your parents are Lewis Russell and-

Catherine Russell: -Carleen Ray.

Alison Stewart: Yes.

Catherine Russell: They taught me more of the nuts and bolts of the business-

Alison Stewart: Oh, interesting.

Catherine Russell: -because they weren't front people.

Alison Stewart: Interesting.

Catherine Russell: They were still in bands and people that were doing the business and all this type of thing, but they weren't the center of attention, see?

Alison Stewart: Oh, that's interesting.

Catherine Russell: They really didn't want to do that, so I had to learn that part of it by myself. My dad died when I was young, but my mother was very, very supportive of my coming into my own as an artist.

Alison Stewart: What did she teach you about the business?

Catherine Russell: To keep the drama on the stage. Look. don't listen to all that mess out there. Just don't get involved in it. Keep it simple. Be on time, keep smiling, be easy to work with, and that's it.

Alison Stewart: Did you have any choice about joining the music business, or was that always going be what your folks, what your mom wanted?

Catherine Russell: She wanted whatever was going to make me successful as a human being. She was a Juilliard graduate. She was very straight-laced, focused, and I was not. She wanted whatever was going to keep me alive on the planet, without going down the wrong path, basically. It didn't matter what career that was, but she did recognize that I had talent as an artist. I was a dancer first, and she got me into that. Then I could always hear music and everything like that, so she supported me in gaining confidence and would always recommend me for gigs, so she'd hire me. She'd recommend, "Oh, I have a daughter that sings." She'd do that, so this is how I got really started in the beginning.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Catherine Russell. Her new album is called My Ideal. She'll also be performing at Birdland Jazz Club, September 3 through the 7th. I understand you were cleaning out your mom's closet, and you found some forgotten tapes of your father playing with Louis Armstrong.

Catherine Russell: Yes, yes, yes. She was still with us at that point, and I was cleaning out her place. She said, "Don't throw anything out because it might be important," and, boy, was she right. I opened one of her closets, and on a shelf that was almost collapsing from the weight of what was on it, turned into all this memorabilia of my dad, photographs and press clippings and all of it because he saved everything. In the midst of that were these glass discs and acetate discs. We didn't know what was on them, and so we took them to a gentleman, Doug Pomeroy, who restored them for us.

Turned out to be from the Louis Armstrong, Lewis Russell orchestra from the Grand Terrace in Chicago between 1938 and 1940. It was amazing. Lewis Armstrong is on there and singers that my dad's orchestra backed. Also, we have reel-to-reel tapes of my dad playing solo piano pieces. We compiled those and put them into a CD, and so it's very exciting. That was volume one. Now we're working on volume two because we keep finding different materials. It's really fun.

Alison Stewart: If you go on YouTube, you can see some of the video.

Catherine Russell: Yes.

Alison Stewart: It's really great. Why did you decide to share it?

Catherine Russell: Oh, because it's a legacy. My parents were very into legacy, so that's why they saved everything. I feel like it's my job to continue that legacy and have people know who Lewis Russell was because a lot of people just don't know his history. It was his orchestra that Lewis Armstrong fronted in the second half of the 1930s. It was a great orchestra. They did a lot of recording together, so we're trying to eep our legacy going.

Alison Stewart: Well, let's keep going. Let's listen to another track from your album, My Ideal. Let's listen to South to a Warmer Place. Let's play it.

[MUSIC -- Alec Wilder: South to a Warmer Place]

Catherine Russell: I'd be glad to stay right here with you

Fact is, that is what I'd planned to

But there's a chill in your embrace

So, I'm heading South - to a warmer place

Seems like yesterday we could kiss and build a fire

Thought I'd given you the best of me

I'd be glad to share the rest of me.

But from that cool look on your face

I think I'll head South to a warmer place.

Alison Stewart: Cath, you have such a beautiful voice. How you take care of it when you're out performing?

Catherine Russell: Thank you so much

Alison Stewart: When you're on the road, specially.

Catherine Russell: Yes, well, keeping talking. I know I like to talk. Keeping talking to a minimum.

Alison Stewart: Okay, thank you.

Catherine Russell: Particularly after the gig and not going to a loud place, you know what I mean? Like, after the gig, don't go someplace where I got to shout over something. No caffeine.

Alison Stewart: You really do take care of it. You really have a schedule.

Catherine Russell: Yes, and I have a vocal regimen. I have two voice teachers that keep me healthy. Yoga, just gargling and steaming it and everything and vocalizing so that I know that I'm warmed up all the way up and down and I can do what I want with my voice. Eating at certain times. I don't eat right before I sing, and I don't eat spicy foods. It sounds a little boring, but I would rather have my voice than play around with, so that type of thing.

Alison Stewart: Got another text. "Love Ms. Russell. Such a deep artist." You're playing Birdland Jazz Club next week starting on September 3. Is this going to be solo, band?

Catherine Russell: It's going to be with my band. It's going to be with my A-plus band, swinging, fantastic band. Matt Munisteri on guitar, Tal Ronan on acoustic bass, Ben Patterson on guitar and Hammond B3, so we got some Hammond B3 flavor in there. The great Mark McLean on drums. They are my ace team.

Alison Stewart: Catherine Russell, the new album is called My Ideal. She'll be at Birdland Jazz Club September 3 through the 7th. We're going to go out on Waiting For the Train To Come. What do you want people to listen for in this track?

Catherine Russell: Oh, just the anticipation of love, anticipation.

Alison Stewart: Catherine, it was a pleasure to meet you.

Catherine Russell: My pleasure. Thank you, Alison. I appreciate it.

[MUSIC -- Marty Block: Waiting for the Train]

Catherine Russell: Waitin' for the train to come in

Waitin' for my man to come home

I've counted every minute of each livelong day

Been so melancholy since he went away

I've shed a million teardrops or more

Waitin' for the one I adore

I'm waitin' in the depot by the railroad track

Lookin' for the choo-choo train that brings him back

[00:28:28] [END OF AUDIO]

 

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