Debby Yeager Transforms Tragedy Into Art

Singer Debby Yeager remembers the first time she heard jazz, even though she did not at the time know what it was. The setting was so powerful that the memory was stored in the recesses of her mind for decades.

In 1996, while she was in the process of recording her first album, she was suddenly overwhelmed with repressed memories.

“I really didn’t know what was happening to me,” says the Orange County resident. “On ‘You Don’t Know What Love Is,’ I was so terribly frightened of the words, especially at the bridge, where one can actually hear the fear and apprehension in my voice.”

As her memories began to surface, Yeager, who appears Thursday night at the Club Brasserie in West Hollywood’s Wyndham Bel Age Hotel, went into therapy and began to uncover a history of what she describes as childhood incest.

“When I was about 4 or 5,” she says, “my father would always come in in the mornings. And while he was abusing me, I would dissociate out the window, and I would tune into the music that our neighbor was playing. I now know that it was John Coltrane and Miles Davis, Betty Carter and Bob Dorough.”

Interestingly, Dorough performs with Yeager on her own first, self-produced album, “Mood Swing.”

“And isn’t that something?” she adds. “Because I sought him out when I started doing the album, before any of these memories surfaced. Now I realize that one of the songs that must have gotten imprinted in my memory was Bob’s ‘Devil May Care,’ which came out in 1957, when I was 4 years old, which is probably why I was so drawn to him. The same was true of some Betty Carter tunes, as well as a Chet Baker tune that I wrote some vocalese for, and they all came out around the same time.”

Yeager’s transformation of a difficult personal tragedy into the substance of her work as an artist is a remarkable example of creative compensation. Now a certified mediation and conflict resolution counselor, she filed a sexual abuse lawsuit in civil court against her father. Last month she was awarded a $2-million judgment by Orange County Superior Court Commissioner Jane Myers.

But Yeager doesn’t expect to see any of the money from her father, who resides in Arizona, and who has had no comment on the matter.

“I’ll probably never get a penny, and I’m broke,” she says, “but the new freedom I’m feeling is worth it. And I can only thank Mother Universe for providing me with that divine neighbor, that jazz saint, and the sounds that lifted my little girl spirit. The repressed memory phenomenon will always remain with me, but so will empathy, and so will jazz.”

Dueling Orchestras: Big-band jazz fans are going to have to make a tough decision on May 2 between two first-rate jazz programs, both of them free.

At 2 p.m., the Hollywood Bowl and the Los Angeles Philharmonic present a performance by the Clayton-Hamilton Jazz Orchestra at Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza, 3650 Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. The program will provide an insightful perspective on what to expect this summer, when the orchestra assumes a prominent role in the jazz life of Los Angeles by serving as the first resident jazz ensemble at the Bowl.

An hour later, at 3 p.m., the Playboy Jazz Festival kicks off its series of free community concerts with a program by Bill Berry’s L.A. Big Band at the Beverly Hills Civic Center Plaza, 450 N. Rexford Drive. The concert will feature a tribute to Duke Ellington--especially timely, since Thursday is the centennial of the legendary bandleader-composer’s birth. The program also includes an appearance by the Paul Smith Trio.

On Record: Can it be that Wynton Marsalis has been cloned? How else to explain his productivity as a performer, composer, educator and administrator? And now Columbia Jazz and Sony Classical have announced the scheduled release of no less than eight Marsalis albums this year as part of a program called “Swinging Into the 21st.” The first CD, “Marsalis Plays Monk,” scheduled for May 18, is a group of takes on Thelonious Monk tunes, released as Vol. IV in Marsalis’ “Standard Time” series. A two-CD set, “A Fiddler’s Tale,” with music composed for concerts pairing Marsalis’ compositions with Stravinsky’s “Histoire Du Soldat,” arrives in June. “Big Train,” with the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, follows in July, with a program of ballet music, “Sweet Release” and “Ghost Story,” scheduled for August. Volume VI of “Standard Time” (Vol. V was released earlier as “The Midnight Blues”), “Mr. Jelly Lord,” with the music of Jelly Roll Morton, arrives in September, followed by “Reel Time,” a group of Marsalis’ film music, in October. As an added incentive, purchasers of all seven albums in the “Swinging Into the 21st” series can obtain a bonus album--”The Marciac Suite,” consisting of music composed by Marsalis for a jazz festival in France--and a slip cover for the albums by collecting and returning seven gold trumpet stickers placed on each CD.

BMG has formed a new catalog label, Buddha Records, to explore the vaults of RCA, Arista, RCA Nashville, Windham Hill and others labels in its archives. The first three releases, all of interest to jazz fans, are on the “Stop Time” Buddha product line and due Tuesday. “Learn to Croon” and “It’s All So New” feature Frank Sinatra performing with the Tommy Dorsey band in radio broadcasts in 1940, 1941 and 1942. The former album includes some familiar standards as well as a number of medleys; the latter is filled with what was, at the time, new material, even though it includes such now-classic items as “Be Careful, It’s My Heart” and “Oh Look at Me Now.”

“A Handful of Keys,” spotlighting pianist-singer-songwriter Fats Waller and His Rhythm, is his only authorized live recording, produced at the New York Yacht Club in 1938, five years before his death of pneumonia while traveling on the Santa Fe Chief from Los Angeles to New York. Such classics as “The Joint Is Jumpin’ ” and “Ain’t Misbehavin’ ” are included, along with a very early example of his work on electric organ.

Vanguard Records is also reviving some valuable catalog material with the arrival of the first items in the reissued “Vanguard Jazz Showcase,” produced by veteran jazz entrepreneur John Hammond. The first two releases, available May 25.