Debbi Ebert Takes a Holiday : She Hopes to Break Away From Country-Western With Performance as Jazz’s Legendary ‘Lady’

For eight years, Debbi Ebert has been on the local club circuit, burning to sing jazz but having to sing country.

“If you can’t do any country and Western in Orange County,” she notes, “you can’t work.”

Starting this week, though, the 35-year-old from Fullerton finally is getting the break she’s been waiting for.

Ebert is playing the late jazz legend Billie Holiday in the Orange County Black Actors’ Theatre production of “Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill” at South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa. Currently in previews, the one-woman show opens Saturday night.

She’s hoping to create enough momentum with her performances to get herself out of the country clubs and into jazz once and for all. Plans for a jazz album already are being made: Working with Fred Katz, who used to be Lena Horne’s musical director, and pianist Ron Kobayahshi, Ebert wants to include at least one Holiday tune, “You’ve Changed,” among a dozen or so originals and standards.

But beyond calling attention to her own career, she wants “Lady Day” to generate “a new kind of appreciation” for Holiday, whose life was the basis of the book and movie “Lady Sings the Blues.”

The play is set in a small bar in Philadelphia in the spring of 1959. Holiday died later that year at 44, of heart failure and cirrhosis. Ebert says the role has made her feel very compassionate toward the singer, not to mention angry.

Born to teen-age parents in 1915, Holiday picked up the nickname “Lady” when she started singing in New York nightclubs and refused to take tips between her thighs. She drew international acclaim for her music, but the constant battles she fought with drugs, men and racism were equally well known. Federal authorities actually arrested her on her death bed in a Harlem hospital, for suspected narcotic addiction.

“It just seemed that no matter what she did, life was like that for her,” Ebert says. “The treatment that she got throughout the South . . . the way she was exploited by the men in her life. It makes me angry.”

The show features 15 of Holiday’s songs, including “God Bless the Child” and “Tain’t Nobody’s Bizness If I Do.” Ebert feels that Holiday was “telling her life through her songs. You got to know Lady through her songs. Those songs were her stories. You’re going to hear about why she loved Sonny (Monroe, her first husband), why she took those drugs. . . .”

Ebert, who has been studying Holiday’s style, is quick to admit that her own voice is heavier than Holiday’s, whose soft, lilting tone did a lot, Ebert thinks, to influence much of today’s music.

But, Ebert notes, although she will try to convey some of the Holiday nuances (“the slurs, the squeaks”), she won’t be “trying to sound like her.” Ebert began developing her own style at the age of 4, singing with her father’s band, the Gospel Fireballs. Billed as the “youngest on the circuit,” Ebert would stand on a step stool to reach the microphone while her father and older brothers sang background.

The band toured California and Arizona, playing to the same crowds as the Staple Singers and the Mighty Clouds of Joy, until Debbi was 9. Then, her father died, the band broke up, and Debbi went back to the choir at the Baptist church in South Central Los Angeles, where she was raised.

Before long, she was listening to the likes of Nancy Wilson, Sarah Vaughan and Carmen McRae. It wasn’t until last year that she took any formal vocal training, signing up with Sara McFerrin, chairwoman of the music department at Fullerton Community College and mother of singer Bobby McFerrin.

Ebert and her husband, Gary, moved to Fullerton in 1982. It was a difficult move for her, as she feared the stigma attached to Orange County. “It’s so conservative, and there are not too many (blacks) out here.”

About a year later, she began working with what is now the Orange County Black Actors’ Theatre. Ebert sang in the group’s first musical revue, “Movin’ On,” and has remained active with the ensemble, singing in “Eubie!,” then serving as the musical director of “Ain’t Misbehavin.’ ”

After “Movin’ On,” with encouragement from her husband (who bought her $2,500 worth of sheet music and electronic equipment), Ebert set out onto the local club circuit. Naysayers told her that, as a black and a woman, she was bound to fail. But she earned back the $2,500 in the first year.

Still, it has taken her this long to feel as if she actually might get to sing the kind of music she wants to sing. Since her first gig, at the Golden Coach in Fullerton, she’s been doing a little rock, a little pop, but mostly country and Western.

She says she’s been able to soften up a few hard-core country fans, though. She says she’ll take something like “Mr. Bojangles” or “On the Road Again” and toss is a rumba beat, and “I can sell it. I can make them like it. Before long,” she adds with a grin, “they’re like jazz lovers from waaaay back.”

Preview performances of the Orange County Black Actors Theatre production of “Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grill” continue through Saturday afternoon at South Coast Repertory, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Curtain today: 8:30 p.m. Tickets: $10.50. The regular run starts Saturday evening and will continue through July 21. Saturday and Sunday matinees are at 3; Sunday evening performances are at 8. Tickets: $17.50 to $20 (opening night: $50). Information: (714) 957-4033.