The story about how I got started starts with my mother. She would play her albums on Saturday and Sunday mornings—Eddie Jefferson, Billie Holiday, John Coltrane. I remember just laying there and listening while she ironed and singing along.
Dee Alexander is a versatile jazz singer who leads her own straight-ahead quartet as well as the more exploratory Evolution Ensemble. She recently received a prestigious 3Arts Award. —Peter Margasak
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A good friend of mine, Theophilus Reed, took me to a place on 14th and Michigan called the Progressive Art Center. It was a big loft and when I walked in there were all of these really cool people; it was an avant-garde scene. I sat down and Rita Warford and Iqua Colson were performing and I was just enthralled by how bold they were, their big jewelry, their colorful dresses, their hair just all over their head, and what they were singing. I didn’t quite get it at the time but they were making all of these different sounds and I was mesmerized.
He invited me down to the Moosehead Lounge on Harrison. I worked there for about three months and I was kind of like just hanging out around the city going to jam sessions. I was probably about six or seven months pregnant and Ken Chaney called me and asked me if I would come down because the singer working with him wasn’t able to make it that night. So I go down here in this white dress and I’m big as a house. Periodically, after my son became a little older, I would go down and sit in, and then Ken called me and I worked with him on and off for about ten years. He really opened me up to improvisation and being uninhibited and just being open creatively.
Then, as fate would have it, I went to visit [Light] and he was on oxygen and thin as a rail. I sat down next to him and he looked me in my eyes and said, “I want you to take care of my music for me.”
Index: 2012 People Issue
