René Marie has enchanted audiences around the world with her wonderfully rich voice. She has also dazzled them with her musical ingenuity, whether transforming the psychedelic Jefferson Airplane favorite “White Rabbit” into an alternately sultry and intense jazz vamp or setting the classic Leonard Cohen ballad “Suzanne” to the insistent drum tattoo of Ravel’s “Bolero.”

Yet, while she’s happy her listeners are appreciative, this Virginia-bred, Denver-based vocal star regards pleasing them as a bonus, not a goal.

“I don’t sing for the audience. I just sing for the pure joy of it,” said Marie, who performs an Athenaeum Jazz at TSRI concert on Nov. 15 with her band, Experiment in Truth.

“I could be just as happy singing at home in my kitchen as I am when I’m on stage with a band. It’s the same type of joy, release and expression of creativity.”


For years, her kitchen was one of the few places anyone could hear Marie — who started off performing in R&B bands as a teenager — sing.

At 17, she became a Jehovah’s Witness, then married her boyfriend and had two sons. Marie also began a 23-year career in banking, starting as a teller, then writing training manuals and teaching customer service representatives.

Her singing was literally on the back-burner, although she and her husband made music together at home with their kids for fun.

Marie’s decision to become a full-time jazz artist when she was 41 would have been dramatic had it been a smooth, event-free transition. But the real-life drama that resulted reads like the soul-sapping script to a decidedly unsettling movie, albeit one that ultimately ends in triumph.


René Marie had a lifetime of experience under her belt before she became a jazz singer in hear early forties. (Photo by John Abbott )

Reinvention and trauma

Her epiphany happened in 1996, when one of her sons, Michael, was home on spring break from college. He phoned her at her bank job from a nearby restaurant, where a singer was performing with a jazz trio.

“He said: ‘Mom, you gotta hear this woman. She sings all the songs you sing at home, and she’s terrible’!” Marie recalled. “I went over and we sat at a table. She wasn’t terrible, just bored with the music and her musicians were bored with her. They were watching TV as she sang. No one was listening.

“My son said: ‘Mom you could do that. You could have them eating out of your hand!”


Marie protested that, at 41, she was too old to start a singing career. Her son was adamant. So she went home to ask her husband’s permission.

“As a good, obedient Jehovah’s wife, that’s what we had to do,” Marie noted. “All decisions were made by the husband.”

She got the go-ahead to pursue jazz, but only as a hobby. Marie began singing with a quintet called Just Friends. Conveniently, the band’s jam sessions were held across the street from the Wachovia bank where she worked.

Within a year, she was leading her own jazz trio and preparing to record her debut album. Not so fast, said her husband, who demanded she end her budding singing career, there and then. If she went to the recording studio, he warned, she could not return home.


Moreover, he vowed, if Marie did go to the studio, she “would have hell to pay.” After Marie asked if he was threatening her, she recalled matter-of-factly, her husband beat her.

“When he was done, I got up off the floor and asked him: ‘Are you finished?’ And he said: ‘Yes.’ I packed up my music, got a few of my clothes and left in my car. I never went back,” she said.

“It wasn’t like I had to choose music over my husband. But I didn’t want to spend any time living in a house with somebody who thinks they can give me an ultimatum and then physically abuse me. It had happened to my mom, and she’d put up with it for years. It wasn’t going to happen with me.”

René Marie credits her abusive ex-husband for inadvertently giving her the push she need to leave him and follow her creative muse. (File photo )


‘A big awakening’

Church elders tried to persuade Marie to go back to her husband. She refused.

“That was a big awakening for me,” Marie said. “I realized I had to go my own way and take my own steps. And I’d never done that in my adult life. So it was a gift my husband gave me. If he’d been sweet and kind, and said: ‘Hey, we’ve got an empty nest now — why don’t you put your music aside and we can spend more time together?’ I would have said: ‘OK.’

“But he said exactly what I needed to hear to go forward on my own. So I’m not mad about that.”

Getting such a late start as a jazz singer could have been fraught with pitfalls. For Marie — who swiftly earned rave reviews for her 2000 debut album, the aptly titled “How Can I Keep from Singing?’ — it was an advantage.


“I considered myself more grounded,” she said. “I had other things to fall back on that allowed me to not be pushed around by people with certain agendas in the music business. I could always say: ‘No. I can do something else’.”

Now a Denver resident, Marie has nine albums to her credit, each more accomplished and assured than the one before it.

Two of her best — 2004’s “Serene Renegade” and 2011’s “Black Lace Freudian Slip” — reaffirm she is not only a very gifted singer, but also a graceful songwriter. Her 2014 album, “I Wanna Be Evil: With Love to Eartha Kitt,” pays loving homage to the singer and actress who — along with Nina Simone, Roberta Flack and Diana Ross (in the Billie Holiday biopic, “Lady Sings the Blues”) — is one of Marie’s biggest inspirations.

“When I was a little girl, I saw Eartha as Catwoman on the ‘Batman’ TV series, although I didn’t know it was her,” she recalled. “I just knew — because I’d lived the first 10 years of my life under Jim Crow laws — that here was this black woman, being evil and sexy with these white men. I was nervous for her!”


Pride and joy

Marie’s most recent album, last year’s “Sound of Red,” contains a song that could serve as her theme, “Joy of Jazz.”

“I think people come to hear live music because they want to be moved,” Marie said. “All day long in our jobs, families, community and country, a bunch of (challenging stuff) happens, but we have to go on to next thing.

“We put off the tears or anger, or frustration, that we have. So I want our music to (help) people open up and be moved and touched on their deepest emotional level, even if it’s anger. Because I’ve written some songs that have an angry point of view, whether about homelessness (‘This Is (Not) a Protest Song’) or racism (‘3 Nooses Hanging’).”

Marie created a national controversy in 2008 at Denver’s annual State of the City mayoral address, where her performance of “The Star-Spangled Banner” incorporated “Lift Every Voice and Sing” (widely known as the “Black National Anthem”).


“Some people got upset — and I’m cool with that, because it means they were touched and something shifted within them,” she said.

“I want something to shift when people listen to our music. I don’t feel a responsibility to write socially conscious songs. … But should the song naturally come out, I’m not going to censor it.”

Athenaeum Jazz at TSRI presents René Marie & Experiment in Truth

When: 7:30 p.m., Nov. 15

Where: TSRI Auditorium, 10620 John Jay Hopkins Drive, La Jolla


Tickets: $30 (Athenaeum members); $35 (non-members)

Phone: (858) 454-5872

Online: ljathenaeum.org/jazz-at-tsri


george.varga@sduniontribune.com

Twitter @georgevarga