Singer Carmen Lundy returns to Bay Area to showcase her own songs

PUBLISHED: November 11, 2019 at 5:12 p.m. | UPDATED: November 13, 2019 at 9:51 a.m.

Carmen Lundy doesn’t believe in delegating responsibilities.

A jazz vocalist, songwriter, arranger, bandleader, actor and painter, she’s spent the past two decades carefully constructing just about every facet of her music. Released last month on her Afrasia label, Lundy’s 15th album, “Modern Ancestors,” is the work of an artist fully in command. Focusing on her original songs, she’s unusually adept at evoking a kaleidoscopic array of emotions and situations.

Lundy has written several tunes that are close to being contemporary standards, like her winsome love song “These Things You Are to Me.” With “Modern Ancestors” she adds several new pieces that are likely to interest her peers, particularly the gospel-powered “Burden Down, Burden Down.”

While she got her start interpreting American Songbook standards, she realized early on that she needed to generate her own material. “That’s what I’ve been doing all these years, writing, arranging, scoring — this is music that I wrote,” says Lundy, 65, from her home in Los Angeles. “It’s taken me a lot of time to get accepted as a true authentic jazz singer bringing everyone new music.”

Lundy has performed at leading venues like Yoshi’s, but she makes her San Francisco debut at the SFJazz Center’s Joe Henderson Lab, playing two shows nightly Nov. 14-17. Nothing better illustrates her self-guided approach to her art than the band she’s bringing to the Bay Area.

The combo is anchored by the veteran rhythm section tandem of bassist Kenny Davis and drummer Terreon Gully. The ensemble also features Juilliard-trained guitarist Andrew Renfroe and 21-year-old pianist Julius Rodriguez, both of whom she mentored during her two-decade run as the resident clinician at Betty Carter’s Jazz Ahead at The Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.

The legendary vocalist Betty Carter turned her band into a proving ground for exceptionally promising young musicians, a mantle that Lundy has picked up both through her work with Jazz Ahead and in her own band.

“I met Julius at Jazz Ahead when he was about 16, and I knew from the first gig I had to record him,” says Lundy, who gives him plenty of room to stretch out on “Modern Ancestors” as the only player featured on every track. “He’s astonishing.”

He was more than ready when he got her call. “If I get the slightest hint I might play a gig, I research all their music, and when I hung up the phone with Carmen, I was listening to her newest record and trying to figure things out,” Rodriguez says. “Her music is not through composed, but the forms aren’t typical. She’s such a great storyteller. You have to be attentive to the structure, and she’s such a great musician, she may call audibles on stage.”

She’s earned multiple awards and honors over the years, but the most telling distinctions have come from her peers. Drum great Terri Lyne Carrington recruited Lundy for her 2011 Grammy Award-winning “Mosaic Project,” an album that features Lundy’s composition “Show Me a Sign.”

The late, revered pianist Geri Allen featured her on the spiritually charged 2006 album “Timeless Portraits and Dreams.” More recently, they collaborated on a 2016 Kennedy Center production of Farah Jasmine Griffin’s play “A Conversation with Mary Lou Williams,” directed by Golden Globe and Emmy Award–winning actor S. Epatha Merkerson.

Born in Miami, Florida, Lundy hails from a brilliant musical family that includes younger brother Curtis, an acclaimed bassist who first earned renown touring and recording with Carter. Lundy herself hit New York in the late 1970s and quickly made a powerful impression performing with the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Jazz Orchestra at the Village Vanguard. George Butler, the head of the jazz department at Columbia Records, took notice of a demo she was working on.

She had spent thousands of dollars financing it, and when the deal with Columbia ultimately fell through, the Jesuit priest Father Peter O’Brien, who had managed Mary Lou Williams, brought Lundy to the attention of Dr. Herb Wong in Palo Alto. He released her 1985 debut album “Good Morning Kiss” on the Blackhawk label.

The album did well, but Lundy wasn’t working. She took a job in Europe singing in the Ellington revue “Sophisticated Ladies” to make ends meet. Back in New York trying to figure out her next move, Lundy had an epiphany after seeing a succession of performances by Sarah Vaughan, Shirley Horn and Nina Simone.

“I can’t compete with Sassy’s ‘Send in the Clowns’ or Shirley Horn’s ‘Here’s to Life,’” Lundy says. “I’m spending all this creative energy on somebody else’s tunes when I could be doing my own music.”

Contact Andrew Gilbert at jazzscribe@aol.com.