COURTESY HAWAII PUBLIC RADIO Jazz singer
discovers
Hawaii rootsNapua Davoy has her
first Honolulu concert
Napua Davoy is finally back home to sing.
Davoy is a well-respected jazz musician known among the cognoscenti but little known outside of that knowledgeable circle. Jazz impresario George Wein says she's "one of the most extraordinary song stylists in today's jazz world." The Village Voice calls her "a hard-swinging pianist and singer with deeper roots in Miles Davis ... with considerable chops and charm to spare."
Napua Davoy
On stage: 7:30 p.m. tomorrow
Place: Atherton Performing Arts Studio, Hawaii Public Radio, 738 Kaheka St.
Tickets: $17.50 general, $15 HPR members and $10 students
Call: 955-8821
Because her mother's family is on Maui (the large Saffrey kamaaina clan from Ulupalakua), Davoy has made the occasional obligatory visit to one of her native homes, the other being her father's Oklahoma birthplace. But she's never been here to perform, until now.
She's an established vocalist-pianist-composer, both in her New York City home and abroad, and a Honolulu audience will make her acquaintance tomorrow at HPR's Atherton Performing Arts Studio, with guest musicians Rob Prester, John Kolivas and Darryl Pelligrini.
Davoy's visit to the islands originally was twofold: "One of the reasons was that I just broke up a long-term relationship," she said by phone from Maui earlier this week, "and the other was to bring back my mother, who was diagnosed with Alzheimer's recently, for probably one last visit home."
Davoy's younger sister has been caring for their mother at the family's home in southeast Beaumont, Texas. Davoy admits her mother "was a difficult woman to grow up with -- but ever since she got Alzheimer's, all the negative parts of her personality have disappeared, and all the positive has come to the surface."
Ever the artist, Davoy said she's putting together a theater-dance piece tentatively titled "The Brighter Side of Alzheimer's" which emphasizes the good things that could come from the debilitating disease.
Davoy has glibly called the meeting of her parents "'The Grapes of Wrath' meets Paradise."
"They married in Tokyo, two years after the end of World War II. He was an Army man from Oklahoma -- just fallen off the turnip truck, as they say -- and she was from Maui, working with 22 other Hawaiian gals for the telephone company, all living in a billet across from these GIs." Davoy is the product of a mixed-race coupling, with Cherokee, Choctaw and English from her father and Hawaiian, Chinese and English from her mother.
She was born in Norman, Okla., when her parents were in their early 20s and her father was attending the university there on the GI bill. But for the last two decades, Davoy has called the Big Apple home, to be close to the internationally savvy jazz and avant-garde scenes.
While she's released several albums under her own name (they will be available at her Honolulu gig), she did have one release on the major Columbia Records label 10 years ago, "a quasi-poppish album that was released, never promoted and ended with me being released from their artist roster."
"I started singing in my 20s, but previous to those years, I was always singing to the pop songs I heard on the radio, and in church," she said. But it was only after college -- which took her from the University of Oklahoma all the way to Oxford University in England, then back to Syracuse University as a graduate student in German literature -- "that I was introduced to jazz by hearing Ella Fitzgerald."
As Davoy puts it, she went mad for the great vocalist, so much so that she dropped her studies to go to Boston and study piano with improvisational guru Charlie Banacos. Four years later she would move to New York City and work as a lounge jazz singer-pianist, where she was discovered one evening by Dr. George Butler, then-head of the jazz division of Columbia Records.
It was at a little piano bar where Harry Connick Jr. used to work, and he "coincidentally was being heavily promoted by Columbia at the time," she remembers. But even though "Napua" was the product of her brief stint with the label, the record producer "was someone I didn't see eye to eye with. In hindsight, I think I would've arranged and produced it differently from him, but it was a golden opportunity to be with a big, fabulous, prestigious record label, and it just didn't work out."
INSTEAD OF stewing in misery afterward, Davoy was committed to honing her craft. She's continued to perform and record, and she's most excited about her current collaboration with a Russian jazz composer, Andrei Kondakov.
"I first met him when I sat him with him in a nightclub in St. Petersburg -- which was owned by the Israeli mafia! It was the club's intention to have singers from the U.S. each spend a month's time there, and I was the first, and last, singer to do it.
"But it gave me a window of opportunity to meet Andrei, who I liken to (and I don't mean to be disrespectful) a George Gershwin." The two have recorded an album together and will perform a fall concert at the Kremlin on a bill with Michel Legrand and Ivan Lins.
After her summer visit here, Davoy will tour Europe for the rest of the season. But for now she promises an evening of musical standards and originals, with some material from her latest album, "Lush Life," containing songs from Duke Ellington to Stevie Wonder.
"I'll also do some Brazilian sambas, some Nina Simone-type work at the piano and do a little theater in the form of introducing myself to the audience."
And, she admits, with every successive visit to Hawaii, the islands are looking mighty good to her as a second home.
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