Singer’s Fans Give Her Strength

Rachelle Ferrell is a record company’s worst nightmare. She’s headstrong and fiercely intelligent, a trend-averse risk-taker who would rather sit out the latest turn in the zeitgeist than submit to its will. A graduate of the Berklee College of Music and a former music teacher, she steeps her sultry sound in R&B;, pop and jazz, but the result doesn’t fit snugly into any of those genres--a big no-no in the micromanaged, chart-sensitive business of commercial music.

In a perfect world, Ferrell’s maverick spirit would be richly rewarded. Instead, her career has suffered dearly because of it.

“I’ve always been a loner,” says Ferrell, 38, who headlines at the Wiltern Theatre on Saturday. “I’ve never conformed to what everyone else was doing. It’s made me who I am, and it’s why I have a unique sound.”

Ferrell’s future looked bright at the start of the ‘90s. With two acclaimed albums--her 1992 self-titled debut and 1995’s “First Instrument”--and a thriving career as a live performer, Ferrell was poised to become a crossover urban chanteuse a la Lauryn Hill. But then a series of events--”interwoven, overlapping disputes,” Ferrell calls them--threatened to derail everything she had worked so hard to achieve.

First, Capitol Records, Ferrell’s label, shut down its black music department, leaving the Pennsylvania native with virtually no corporate support system. “I was in flux for a long time,” says Ferrell. “There were some folks there that just didn’t get what I was doing.”

A few regimes later, Ferrell is still with Capitol, which released her album “Individuality (Can I Be Me?)” last fall. Less smoothly resolved, though, was a protracted dispute with a production company to which she was contracted. The legal battle, which began before her debut release, dragged on for eight years until it was finally settled out of court, and it exacted a heavy emotional toll on Ferrell, who began to question whether the fight was even worth the effort.

“That was the whole point of the experience, I think,” says the musician. “You know, will I be able to find a deep enough calling to share the gift and to endure? It’s one thing to have a deep love with music and feed your spirit with it, but the minute you approach the level where commerce joins music, it introduces a whole new landscape and threatens to sever the connection between the music and your love for it.”

The lawsuit did not preclude Ferrell from performing live, and she received a wealth of approbation from receptive audiences who did not forget her, despite the recording hiatus. “The audiences were there for me when I was tired, and it made me feel empowered and loved,” says Ferrell. “All of that went right back into the music of the new CD.”

“Individuality (Can I Be Me?),” whose liner notes include a letter of thanks from Ferrell to her fans, has been No. 1 on the contemporary jazz chart for four months. (It was in the overall Top 200 for about two months last fall, and has sold about 160,000 copies to date.) It alternates sensual torch ballads with slow-burn funk, as Ferrell snakes her 6 1/2-octave voice through languorous grooves that conjure the ghosts of Marvin Gaye and Donny Hathaway.

“The groove is the heartbeat, the pulse,” says Ferrell. “It’s how the blood and the nourishment get pumped through your system. The groove and the melody have to have proper coordination with each other or else you have poor circulation.”

Free from the financial headaches that burdened her for so long, Ferrell has been savoring her newfound freedom, finding sustenance in the positive reinforcement she gets from live audiences.

“They tell you their deepest stories, and how they’ve been able to endure illness and death because of my music,” she says. “Whenever I think I’m tired of this, and that it’s a pain, the fans remind me why I’m doing it.”

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Rachelle Ferrell, Wiltern Theatre, 3790 Wilshire Blvd., L.A., Saturday at 8 p.m. $32.50 to $52.50. (213) 380-5005.