SomoneToWatchOverMe

(39) A Female Jazz Singer in Seattle Someone To Watch Over Me
(in Japanese)

Edmonia Jarrett(1933-2002)

I had a chance to see an old woman Edmonia Jarrett singing in a outlying restaurant in Seattle in summer of 1996. She was a quite famous singer around there.

I got surprised that she sang “Someone To Watch Over Me” in a very low key; A flat. I got back to Japan and found it an octave lower than Ella.

She and I enjoyed talking between stages. She wrote her autograph on a cover photo of her CD. You see the beautiful handwriting in a photo.　

“Kuni, Music is Universal Enjoy, Edmonia Jarrett”

I didn’t skimp on the tip, of course.

She recorded the album that has a strong title “Live, Live, Live !” after she survived cancer.

The site “The Jazzdog” owners Keith and Claudia Church broke a tragic news of Edmonia in 2002. That article had a picture of her CD “Live, Live, Live!” with her autograph. It has the same handwriting as the above. Anyone knows the same person wrote both.

I couldn’t believe my eyes. They wrote that they knew Edmonia in 1995. They became her fans and have never betrayed since then. I really got surprised at the jacket of that CD.

I did’t know Edmonia passed away until now. I just wondered how she was every time I saw this page of my site, but I couldn’t get any local information because she was not a famous singer the U.S. wide.

She started her career as a jazz singer at the age of fifty-five. She sang gospels until then. A late bloomer fugacious. 2008/2/29

Ernestine Anderson(1928- )

Before I arrived in Seattle, I was going to listen to a famous singer in Seattle, Ernestine Anderson at her place. But it is same everywhere to do good business in jazz, she closed that place and she sometimes sings at other places. A jazz piano bar in Minami Aoyama, Japan closed its twenty-year history. I often visited there when I was younger. I hope to see Mr. Arifuku playing the piano, sometime, somewhere.

“What a weary world…” Finance Ministry and banks made up this world awful. They blew too much air into the asshole of Japanese economy… and it blew out. Economy is not a rain frog. When I was a child, a junior high school student of the neighborhood caught a rain frog and blew into its asshole. They spend taxpayer money to the bank with bad-dept…several hundred billion yen!

A lot of awful things happen here in Japan. If you regard Japan as a peaceful country, you are a careful person. Music makes us forget bad news while we enjoy it.

Translated by Kisshi