Oregon Music News

Portrait by Diane Russell who will be showing her work at the Silverton Festival

Nancy King knows everyone in The Night Hawk out on Interstate Avenue, and everyone knows her.

She was sitting in a booth, eating ham and eggs with a side of pancakes, telling me about a dream she had in which Ella Fitzgerald visited her and convinced her to keep on living and singing. Told it to me like she was telling the story for the first time. Her eyes wide as she used the words Ella said to her…but it was as though she were convincing ME not to kill MYself. She was spellbinding.

Then one of the Night Hawk folks walked up and she told him that she was telling me the Ella story.

That’s how you can keep singing the same songs for decades and still be just as thrilling each and every time.

She will be playing with bassist Glen Moore and pianist Dan Gaynor at this Saturday’s Silverton Jazz and Wine Festival 8:30-10:30 pm at the Palace Theater.

On June 15th she will celebrate her 70th birthday with a show at Tony Starlight’s.

If you’d like to see her and Glen in action and learn some of their long history together, watch a TV story I did on Nancy and Glen from 2000.

Listen to Nancy and Steve Christofferson do “Perennial.” Later in the interview, she’ll talk about it and how Dan Gaynor played it with her at age 17.

Meanwhile, back at the Night Hawk, she was talking about this week’s rehearsal with Moore and Gaynor:

Glen Moore

Dan knows all of our stuff, all of my stuff without anything, and Ralph (Towner) and Oregon. Glennie knows what Danny knows…all my shit AND King and Moore. We’ve only got two hours to kill all these bases. He and Dan are going to play some Oregon stuff. I’m not going to be involved in that…one tune. We’ve got two 45 minute sets and the first set we’ll probably play the hour and then take a twenty-minute break and then play another fifty. Everybody gets their money’s worth.

We’ve got all these scenarios. Dan will lay out and Glennie and I will do something and then Dan’s going to join us for like “Alligator Dancing” because he knows it. We can do some originals. Dan’s written two or three things that they do. Then Dan and I’ll do something and Glennie will take a hike. Dan and I will do a ballad or something…something pretty and then we’ll all do it together.

That’s what we’re getting together for, to make a set list, so things move along. So we don’t get up there like we normally do on a gig and just go for it. What do we play now? I dunno, how about “Summertime?” Ok. We never rehearse. Rehearse what? What’s the point. Us improvisers. All you do is point and shoot when you get to the gig.

I can go with the flow. I can go with whatever list those two come up with. Not like I don’t care, but when they put it together, they put it in different keys, so everything doesn’t sound the same.

It’s gonna be a great show, I know it. It’s just sad that it’s once a year.

After a diversion with a flirtatious waiter and several other topic leaps, she started in on the one of the problems she used to have when she was a young singer — too pretty and too damned good.

I’ve never been in competition with any other singers, from the top of the heap to the bottom. I just do what I do and that’s what I do and if you like it fine, if you don’t that’s fine. But I’m not gonna go out and take your gig. That used to happen all the time when I was young. And it was usually I was cute and could carry a tune and was cuter than whoever was there, not carrying a tune as well as I could. I lost a lot of friends…singer friends…we were all after the same things.

We’d sit in somewhere and the owner would say, “Crap! I’ve been listening to this and I could have had THIS?” I didn’t do it on purpose, so I quit going to my friends’ gigs and sitting in. I just stopped doing it. They’d (the manager) just come up and bald-face asked me to my face that night, “Hey, when can you start here?” And I’d go, “This is so-and-so’s gig.”

“Yeah, well, giving her two-week’s notice tonight. I gotta get some people in here, you can really sing! This is crap!” And I’d go, “But…uhhh uhh uhh.” I needed to pay my rent and I’d say I was sorry. The other singer would be mad.

Do you have to work on stuff with Glen now?

Not unless it’s something new. They only work we do is we come to his studio and we learn it and then do it. You know, Glennie…our King and Moore stuff is really cool. If it never gets revived…that was almost twenty years ago…twenty-two…nineteen…and we were so fertile at that time because we had Samantha (Moore’s wife) writing brilliant lyrics, weird but brilliant, always brilliant…Uncle Jazzbo Collins gone wrong…so outly hip…

For bass and face, we were…people still remember us with great admiration. You could hold people for three hours with the two of us. Cuz Glennie’s just that way. He’s a multi-instrumentalist in his writing and he tries to play everything on the bass…which is why I still love to play with him. Him, Stevie (Steve Christofferson), Freddie (Fred Hersch, with whom she was nominated for a Grammy) and John Stowell.

Why did you choose Dan to play with?

Dan Gaynor

He memorized every tune by ear off of “Perennial.” One night he came in to Jazz de Opus and Stevie asked if he wanted to do a tune with Nan. I said I’d love to if you want to. He had just finished learning “Moonlight To You.” He was probably about seventeen.

He was headed to liking accompanying…of course I kind of spoiled him. If everybody could sing like me, they’d play with singers all the time.

I had been hearing it in him. The fact that he liked vocalists…he wasn’t one of those kids who just go for the instrumentalists… That was the first night I had played with him. We get up on the stage and he was all cute. We did something first…A Thousand Eyes or something like that. He was on overplay. He was playing way too much. And I was going, “WOOO WOOO WOOO.” Some of the things that I was scatting and my ideas, he was playing them…I mean we were on the same…and we were so tuned in that he was overplaying instead of just comping…it would be still in his brain but…he wasn’t comping, which he has learned to do…admirably, I might add, by now.

That was his first attempt at accompanying me. I was exciting him so bad, he was just on overplay. He was all over me and all over him and he was like, “I’m sorry…..oh my god…” He was freaking out on the up tune. We were panting and laughing. It was like a horse race. He just couldn’t help it. It was very cute.

Steve was going, “Holy crap!” It was overkill but the boy’s got it.

I said, “What do you want to play now?”

He said, “I’d like to try ‘Perennial.’”

I thought, that’ll knock Steve’s sock’s off cause he had just written it. Nobody knew it but us. No-Body. It is very difficult and it has a lot of changes and if you don’t play it right…nobody had played it.

So we play it and Steve is crying by the end of it. He played shit that even Steve didn’t play…on the chords…it was so beautiful I was dying. It was all I could do to keep from balling. I was listening to the lyrics. Those beautiful lyrics that Joel Siegel wrote…”Colombine, lilac tulip on a honeysuckle vine.”

And here’s little Dan playing his version…and not all over me, he’d play on the chords and I’d just go (untranslatable sound)…it was just amazing.

We get to the end…the place was quiet. Everybody had just gone…stunned. He just sat at the piano looking around like it was either too much for them or it was awful. Oh my god!

Steve was literally crying.

I’ve been in love with Dan since then.

Think you might do that Saturday night?

Oh fuck yeah.

Oregon Music News is happy to be a sponsor of The Silverton Wine and Jazz Festival.