The 'real jazz mama' on tour here<\/p>\n
By Mehru Jaffer<\/p>\n
JAKARTA (JP): Monica Crosby loves quaffing tea almost as much
\nas she loves music. But she had to travel all the way to
\nIndonesia to fully appreciate what goes into the growing and
\nharvesting of tea.<\/p>\n
\"The efforts of all those women working in the fields! For the
\nfirst time in my life I saw what it takes to make tea,\" says
\nFlorida's first lady of jazz after a drive through the tea
\nplantations of Puncak. There she saw firsthand hundreds of women
\nlaboring in the heat.<\/p>\n
\"I stepped out of the car and looked around at the lush green
\nhills, at all the leaves the workers have to pluck. The sight was
\noverwhelming\".<\/p>\n
Sightseeing is something that Monica is allowed to do only in
\nher spare time when she is not performing before growing legions
\nof fans in Jakarta.<\/p>\n
\"Monica is the result of a five-year search by the Regent
\nHotel to find a real jazz maestro to perform in its lounge. We
\nhave had jazz music before but only by local musicians. Monica is
\nthe real thing,\" says an excited Nuni Sutyoko-Rasad -- a public
\nrelations manager -- as she introduces the 51-year-old singer who
\nis performing in Asia for the first time.<\/p>\n
Monica has done a lot of Top 40 music in the past and enjoyed
\nthe energy, choreography and the traveling that went with it. But
\nafter having rocked as a former Ikette with the Ike and Tina
\nTurner Revue, all she really wants to do now is sit on a stool
\nand sing lyrics that make sense. She feels more and more
\ncomfortable with rhythm and blues. \"I am not saying that rock and
\nthat kind of music doesn't make sense. But a lot of time it can
\nget out of hand. I find it kind of screamy, deafening and I am
\nunable to understand what is being conveyed. I prefer words like,
\nThe very thought of you... and I forget to do... the ordinary
\nthings that I ought to do...\"<\/p>\n
And those who have heard her sing in Jakarta aren't
\ncomplaining. In fact she has been making sense since she arrived
\nin February to anyone who prefers the standard classics of jazz
\nto the often mind-deadening sounds of rock and roll.<\/p>\n
Evolved partly from spirituals sung by slaves, jazz remains
\nthe only truly American form of music, created by African-
\nAmericans for African-Americans.<\/p>\n
The word jazz was first spotted in print in a San Francisco
\nnewspaper in 1913. According to the Chronicle of Jazz by Mervyn
\nCooke, it has sexual connotations and is thought to be a
\nderivation of the word \"orgasm\" which in slang was shortened to
\n\"jasm\". Sometime around 1915 several bands added the provocative
\nexpletive Jass to their names. The original Dixieland Jass Band
\neventually dropped the double \"s\" and replaced it with \"zz\" after
\npranksters kept erasing the letter \"j\" from their posters!<\/p>\n
Notwithstanding the libidinous origins of the word, Monica
\nsays that jazz means everything to her today. It is her life,
\nlove, pleasure and relaxation.<\/p>\n
She started singing at the age of five, but in order to
\nsupport herself and her four children she spent most of her life
\ndoing whatever work was necessary -- and this includes teaching,
\nbeing a mail carrier and a clerk in an accounting office.<\/p>\n
\"As kids we were too poor to take lessons in singing. Nobody
\ntaught my mother to sing and nobody taught music to us. My 77-
\nyear-old mother is still a much-loved gospel singer in her home
\ntown in Arizona,\" she says.<\/p>\n
In 1994, when she could finally afford to, she went to a music
\nschool for lessons. When the teacher heard her sing and said,
\n\"Monica why don't you go home. Please do not try to fix what is
\nnot broken.\"<\/p>\n
So Monica did just that, and she continues to be popular not
\njust throughout the United States but in Puerto Rico, the
\nBahamas, Mexico and the Netherlands as well. She is happy to be
\nsinging full time as a career and says that she wasted far too
\nmuch time and energy on two ex-husbands. Her children are adults
\nnow and she is ecstatic about being able to do something she
\nloves for a living.<\/p>\n
\"Don't ever look at me as the dollar sign for I'm a treble
\nclef from top to toe,\" she warns friends and fans as soon as she
\nsees them getting that silly look in their eyes.<\/p>\n
Her visit to Jakarta materialized out of the blue when another
\nsinger asked her for a favor one day. \"Sure,\" she said without
\nrealizing she was being asked to live in Indonesia for four
\nmonths. \"It's so far away,\" was her first reaction. But, unlike
\nmany Americans, Monica knows something about the history and
\nculture of Indonesia, for as a child in school she singled out
\nIndonesia as the subject for a project report. \"I chose Indonesia
\nbecause I saw a smiling face in a copy of National Geographic,
\nand also because the country seemed to be covered with flowers\".<\/p>\n
When she was asked to come here last February she was reminded
\nof this and thought to herself, \"Deja-vu, perhaps ...?\"<\/p>\n
She has seen and read much about the recent struggle of the
\nIndonesian people, and says, \"I am a people's person and no
\ntelevision pictures, no matter how violent, can scare me away
\nfrom other people.\" She adds that it was never a fear of people
\nthat made her think twice about coming here. It was just the
\ndistance.<\/p>\n
Since her music is born directly out of the hardships of
\nslavery in America, she cannot imagine performing in a place that
\nfrowns on freedom of expression, and she is happy to be singing
\nin a more tolerant, liberal Indonesia. Monica wants more than
\nanything to soak in the Indonesian experience as much as possible
\nbefore she leaves at the end of May, so she can croon what
\npromises to be her greatest achievement as a vocalist -- a song
\nthat mingles the music of Indonesia with that of her homeland.<\/p>",
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