Barbara Blair has made a career out of performing, teaching and sharing music with audiences young and old in Canada and the United States.

Music changes everything. Vocalist Barbara Blair says she hears the story all the time, from musicians, listeners - even from her own husband. He was about to quit school in 10th grade when a jazz singer and her trio gave a free lunchtime concert at his school. He heard the music, and something changed. "Something in the music told him there was something out there better than what he had known," Blair said. The nationally-acclaimed singer now makes it her mission to bring that change to as many people, especially young ones, as often as possible. She and her trio perform in Astoria Saturday, Oct. 28, at the historic Liberty Theater. The concert is a benefit event with proceeds going to Liberty Restoration Inc. and Tillicum Foundation, owners and operators of Coast Community Radio. Growing up in Vancouver, British Columbia, Blair had music all around her. Her parents owned a record store and threw dinner parties where the guests always ended up singing around the piano. She performed on the radio for the first time at 13 and struck out on a career as a pianist and accompanist, earning diplomas in vocals and piano at Camosun College-Victoria Conservatory of Music. Her love of singing led her to join a jazz choir, and at her first rehearsal, during a run through of George Gershwin's "Someone to Watch Over Me," it happened. Life changed. "That old Gershwin tune created such joy in me," Blair said in an article by music critic Joseph Blake in the Victoria Times Colonist. "It was suddenly clear where I wanted to spend the rest of my life. I knew I had come home." Barbara described the tribute concerts she's been doing for the past 20 years. "It's a nice focus for an evening," Blair explained. She regularly performs programs of songs by one particular composer - Gershwin, Cole Porter, Harold Arlen, Duke Ellington, Jerome Kern. Saturday's concert will feature the musical theater duo of Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, who penned some of the most famous tunes in entertainment history, starting with amateur musicals and charity benefits in the 1910s and working in Hollywood and on Broadway through Hart's death in 1943. Rodgers went on to create another famous collaboration with Oscar Hammerstein. Blair is ecstatic that "the great American songbook" is being revived by popular singers of today. "People like Rod Stewart, Linda Ronstadt, Leonard Cohen, Michael Bolton - all sorts are doing CDs now based on the American songbook," she said. "I don't care who records these songs, I don't care how they sing them. Their fans get to hear this music ... they keep that music going."


Equally as important, and as joyful, as her performing is Blair's education program, The School of Cool - An Introduction to Jazz, At school assemblies, Blair and her accompanist engage their youthful audiences with swing music that gets everyone's toes tapping. "We have such a small window of time at the schools," she commented. "We're usually in and out of a school within two hours." So Blair tries to make personal contact with as many kids as possible while she's there. She will arrange before her visit to meet with a small group of students backstage, and within about 20 minutes, teach them to sing and play rhythm percussion instruments on one of her numbers. Onstage, it's clearly nothing but fun. "If one little kid is influenced by what they hear, that's what it's all about," she said. Blair's backup band includes Tom Vickery on piano, Joey Smith on bass and guitar and Lou Williamson on drums. Vickery tours internationally as Blair's accompanist. Smith has toured with Cleo Laine, Herb Ellis and Charlie Byrd. Williamson, a former Montreal jazz scene regular, toured with the Woody Herman, Glen Miller and Harry James bands. The group is touring the Oregon Coast this week, making a stop in Seaside to rehearse and performing an already-sold-out concert in Florence Friday, Oct. 27. Blair says she's encouraged by the reception she's gotten in small towns, especially in the number of families who bring their children to her concerts. "In smaller communities, I look out and see little kids - often sound asleep," she said. "But they're there, and they're being exposed to this wonderful music. So it's a late night for them ... “she said. To her, it's worth it.

The Great North American Songbook?
A native Canadian, Barbara Blair says she isn't bothered that the songs she's so passionate about are known collectively as "the great American songbook." At the time they were being written, New York and Hollywood were the Meccas for music, she says. "I think a lot of the world grew up listening to the great American songbook," she says. "Those things cross borders without any help at all."
 

 

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