Gallinger Brings Life to Tunes

Imagine you’re a jazz singer looking for some interesting new material. There’s always the material in the Great American Songbook, of course. Rarely heard gems, perhaps, from Cole Porter, Jerome Kern or the Gershwins. Or maybe a few offbeat Ellington items or some Jon Hendricks scat lyrics.

OK, but how about Bill Evans?

Most singers, at this point, would take a deep breath and say, “The jazz piano-playing Bill Evans?” well aware that the harmonically lush, melodically soaring music of the gifted artist, who died 20 years ago at age 51, is one of the great, complex expressions of modern jazz. But not exactly the sort of music--with a few exceptions--one immediately associates with lyrical songwriting.

And, to some extent, that’s the reaction singer Karen Gallinger had when the notion of doing an entire album of Bill Evans material first came to mind.

“I had always been intrigued by his music,” said Gallinger, who performs Sunday in Santa Ana. “Piano players would reverently drop his name, so I always had that sense without having ever actually having immersed myself deeply in his music. But I knew it was really challenging, which may have been one of the things that kept me away from it.”

And that was that until, about a year ago, an oddly serendipitous event took place. Just about the time she was thinking about a possible Evans album, she was introduced to Nenette Evans, the pianist’s widow.

“I told her I was thinking about doing Evans’ tunes on my next album,” Gallinger recalled. “She was, let’s say, skeptical, but I gave her my current CD, ‘My Foolish Heart.’ I guess she liked what she heard, because she called me the next morning and said, ‘Let’s have breakfast.’ I met her and she showed up with a bagful of Evans material that essentially contained all my research material.”

Gallinger added lyrics of her own to four Evans tunes--including her hard-grooving interpretation of his “Funkallero”--but the process took time and effort.

“There were times during the project when I completely despaired of ever actually learning the material,” she said. “But when I jumped into the pool of his music, I jumped in deeply, and I just decided to stick with it.”

And she did. It took six months to complete “Remembering Bill Evans: A Vocal Tribute.” The album, on the Sea Breeze label, is now in stores, and will likely generate the sort of superlatives--”immensely talented,” “enormous range and quality,” “passion and sensitivity”--that have greeted her past efforts.

On Sunday, Orange County jazz fans will have the opportunity to experience Gallinger’s encounter with Evans live at the Cribb Theater at the DePietro Performance Center. The performance will be the first in what she plans as a “multimedia Evans presentation, with slides, narration and music.”

“We won’t have it all together for this event,” she said, “but it’ll still be entertaining. We have a few slides of Bill, I’ll talk a bit about his life, and the guys [pianist Tom Zink, bassist Larry Steen and drummer Chris Wabich, all of whom are on the album] will do a little presentation of how the piano trio style evolved in the work of Bill and bassist Scott Lafaro.

“Bill being the icon that he is, my goal was to try to make the material more accessible to people who might not know his work, without dumbing down the material to the point where his fans would be offended. Hopefully I’ve struck a balance.”

Has the quest to further illuminate Evan’s music tended to obscure Gallinger’s musical persona? She is, after all, one of the area’s most familiar voices, a graduate of Orange Coast College, a vocal teacher and a performer comfortable in everything from blues and jazz to pop and rock.

“Well,” she said with a laugh, “there were times when I felt as though I was buried in Bill Evans.

“But it’s been about a year now since I first started absorbing the material, and I do the songs very differently now than I did them then. When I recorded them, they had just gotten into my head, but they’re a lot more comfortable now. They’re still Bill tunes, but I think I’ve gotten to the point where I can bring a lot of myself to the material.”

And Gallinger is beginning to receive the kind of feedback that suggests she is successfully managing the balance between introducing Evans to a wider audience while enhancing her own musical expression.

“I’ve had a few people come to me to buy my album,” she explains, “and say, ‘You know, I’ve never heard Evans like this before, and I’m going to go out and buy some of his CDs.’ Which is exactly what I’d like to have happen. And wouldn’t it be nice if it worked the other way around, occasionally, if hearing his music led them to my vocal interpretations? You never know.”

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Jazz vocalist Karen Gallinger performs at 4 p.m. Sunday at the Cribb Theater, DePietro Performance Center, 809 N. Main St., Santa Ana. $15. (714) 550-9890.