Jazz vocalist Hilary Gardner grew up in Wasilla, Alaska, dreaming about making it big in New York City. But it all started with a little country music.
Gardner, who had a big hit on stage singing in the 2010 Broadway production Come Fly Away, recently returned to her roots with the release of On the Trail with the Lonesome Pines, a country-tinged album full of classic ballads and featuring a cover of “Along the Santa Fe Trail.” In the album’s liner notes, Gardner says: “The songs on this album evoke all the romantic mythology of the American West and remind us that the answers to many of life’s big questions can be found in contemplative solitude, the beauty of the natural world, and the arms of a loved one.”
The singer recently talked with Pasatiempo about the album and her life in music.
Is this the kind of music that inspired you when you were growing up?
Yes and no. Yes in the sense that I grew up in Alaska, which is very far West. There was a lot of country music in the ether and also in my house.
We moved to Alaska right before I turned 7, and we drove up the ALCAN Highway listening to Merle Haggard the whole time. I grew up listening to Patsy Cline and singing along to Patsy Cline. She was a hugely formative influence on me, and in fact, the first music I ever got paid to sing was when I was a teenager.
I was a karaoke ringer to get the party started. That was my part-time job on weekends in these crummy little bars, and I would sing Patsy Cline tunes. So in a way, yes, the twang is absolutely going back to square one.
Hilary Gardner’s latest album combines elements of jazz and Western swing with lyrics celebrating the American West. Photo Margherita Andreani
But also most of this music was totally new to me, and a lot of these songs are wonderful tunes that kind of exist in this gray area that’s somewhere between Hollywood and jazz and country.
Why do you think that is? Is it the instrumentation? Is it your vocal inflections?
The people who were writing these songs — Johnny Mercer, Frank Loesser, Joseph J. Lilley — were writing for Hollywood and sometimes musical theater.
The guy who wrote the music for the song “Along the Santa Fe Trail,” Wilhelm Grosz, was an Eastern European Jewish classically trained musician who came to the States and started writing for Hollywood. These are all the ingredients for the songs that form the Great American Songbook and that eventually become jazz standards.
Even if Gene Autry sang it in a film, the songs are built kind of with that elasticity that we think of as being related to jazz.
Then certainly the way we come at them; we live in New York City and we’ve all played jazz music a long time. There’s something wonderful about playing the tunes as they are, letting some of that twang come in and experimenting with different instrumentation. The hallmark of a great song is you can come at it any way you want and it holds together.
Living in New York was your dream? You worked hard to get there. It really meant a lot to you to be in New York, to stay in New York, and to break through in New York?
I always wanted to come to New York. I read about it in books when I was a kid. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Harper & Bros, 1943). And there was a wonderful series called All-of-a-Kind Family that was about a Jewish family on the Lower East side of Manhattan at the turn of the 20th century. I loved that series. E.B. White’s Here is New York (Harper & Bros, 1949). The city was so alive in my imagination long before I came. I moved in 2003. Thankfully I had no idea what I was getting myself into and that helped, because you say, ‘How hard can it be?’ and you just jump in. The city’s been very generous to me, and it’s home now. I’ve lived here much longer than I’ve lived anywhere else.
I read you were a waitress for many years while trying to keep the dream alive?
You bet. It’s a skill you can take anywhere, and it’s inherently flexible. You can schedule your life around it, and there’s good people in that business. I think everyone should have to wait tables for a year. It should be mandatory.
And then all your hard work paid off; what a triumph it must’ve been for you to be on Broadway with Twyla Tharp’sCome Fly Away.
That was such a case of all the stars aligning at the right time. That was the first and only Broadway audition I ever went on. A friend told me about the show, and I thought, ‘I can’t audition for that. Clearly they’re not looking for me.’
But a good friend of mine was working as the company manager for the show, and he said, ‘I’ll get you an audition.’ It was so random.
So I went in, but it was all these singers belting their faces off. I could hear through the door, and I turned to my friend, who I had brought to accompany me, and I said, ‘I’m so sorry. This was a huge mistake. I’ll take you to lunch. Let’s get this over with.’
Because I knew I wasn’t going to get it, I just went in and went by the piano and sang a few tunes. And as it turned out, that’s exactly what Twyla was looking for.
When the show actually started running, I had been a big band singer in New York City for many years already. I knew most of the guys in the band.
It was just a much more glamorous version of the gigs I had been doing for swing dancers or whatever throughout the city.
Do you ever make it back to Wasilla? Was former Wasilla mayor Sarah Palin your neighbor? Sorry if that’s an annoying question.
I have not been back to Wasilla in many years because I no longer have any family who lives there. Maybe I’ll go back to do a show there at some point.
I did not know Sarah Palin but her dad did substitute teach for me in high school.
My dad knew her because my dad was really active with Little League, and he dealt with the mayor’s office. But I left about 10 minutes after I turned 17. — S.F.
Listen to Hilary Gardner’s new album On the Trail with the Lonesome Pines on streaming services including Spotify, Apple, and Amazon.
