Deviana vows to break the ceiling

By Mehru Jaffer

JAKARTA (JP): When Deviana Daudsjah, 42, saw Abdurrahman Wahid sworn in as the fourth president of Indonesia on television, she decided that it was at last time to come home.

So overnight all further engagements in Basel, Switzerland, were canceled and the Jazz musician and composer packed up her belongings of 25 years to return to Jakarta.

"Most people I know think that I am crazy to have done this," said Deviana, who had a lucrative career in Europe cutting records, playing live and televised concerts, and as the music director of Theater Basel.

In fact, she had been toying with the idea of moving back for some time.

"Life was very comfortable and secure, but there was something missing. I longed for the company of my mother, my sister. I missed my family, my natural environment," she said in a sorrowful tone.

But she realized that she also needed to make music wherever she decided to live. All those years she had been able to do so with much more freedom in Europe than in Indonesia, where people's lives had been restricted for more than three decades by all kinds of formalities, procedures and conventions. She found it difficult even to breathe in such an atmosphere and to create her kind of music -- to which the description of German philosopher Hegel of a beach neither sea nor land is fitting -- seemed almost impossible.

The soul of jazz after all is about harmonic improvisation and exploration all the time, and the oddly eccentric nature of this music abhors playing to the tune of anyone. Jazz is the art of the individual musician with a specific language conveying subtle shades of emotions of the moment and not just an abstract aesthetic gesture. The only truism about jazz remains that the performer playing a theme always tries to make it sound not like itself, but like himself.

It is almost impossible perhaps to play jazz restricted to any one style even though it was born out of the music of West African slaves isolated from their home and the superior attitude of their white masters which they were forced to suffer in the cotton fields of the U.S. After that it took this most enigmatic of musical forms years to come to terms with its own idiosyncratic nature that today prides itself upon not having any respect for restraint of any kind.

Therefore, all that this instinctive musician could do was continue to educate herself and to wait for Indonesia to reconcile itself to the importance of individual freedom before she finally returned forever.

And now that she is here, she threatens to "Break the Glass Ceiling" that has muffled the notes of this medium of music for so long in her native country. At an evening organized by Debra H. Yatim of Komseni, Communications for the Arts with the same theme here recently, music lovers concluded that the jazz scene in Jakarta may never be the same again with the return of Deviana.

"I want to share everything that I have learned over the years with professional musicians and lovers of jazz here," Deviana explained, giving details of a series of training workshops she will conduct from April 15, running into September.

Apart from performing, she wants to teach jazz music and organize concerts all over the country. And if the curtain raiser presented the same evening after a discussion on "Jazz and You" is anything to go by, then it should not be too difficult for this waiting-to-erupt vocalist, pianist and superb entertainer to eventually engulf the entire city into the throbbing folds of her hot music.

After a short piece on the piano, Deviana gave a solo performance, dedicating one of the numbers to her mother, who was in the audience. The highlight of the evening was the appearance on stage of the "gang of four" with Deani, Rizainy and Alekszandra joining Deviana to make the most wonderful music heard in a long time. The four women played classical jazz numbers and later turned Indonesian folk songs from Aceh, Sulawesi and Ambon into mainstream jazz tunes that got the audience rocking wildly to the unique rhythm.

Although working with three other women here, Deviana does not see herself as a flag bearer for women musicians alone. "That is too fanatical an attitude," she said. She wants to encourage a love of music among people of both sexes. The reason she feels there are so few women involved in jazz is because of the traditional roles played by men and women in society itself. She finds it so difficult to talk about the importance of gender equality here. She wonders how an awareness can be created when in traditional societies like Indonesia.

She has noticed that many changes are taking place outside of Indonesia.

Pretty women are not just used by musical bands to decorate the stage anymore. They are lead singers, instrumentalists and business managers too in the West. As the role of women in day-to-day life changes, society will also change, including the male dominated sphere of jazz.

"We are all part of an evolutionary process, but the future looks brighter than ever," the impish looking Deviana insisted with a wide grin.

Born in Jakarta of a Manadoese mother and an Acehnese father, Deviana recalls a huge collection of music at home from around the world. One of her earliest memories is listening to Ella Fitzgerald, the black American singer whose voice has been warming the hearts of jazz lovers ever since 1935, along with Indonesian folk songs. She dreams of a day when music will not be classified as this or that but simply as good or bad music.

When she was one year old, the family moved to Thailand, where she began piano lessons at the age of five, and later went on to graduate from the Music Academy Freiburg, Germany. Here she also worked as the academic director for jazz and rock before she moved to Switzerland to give lessons in piano and vocal music.

In the spirit of true jazz that recognizes no boundaries and favors all kinds of fusion, Deviana was accompanied from Europe by Alekszandra Svekan, a Hungarian born Swiss vocalist who makes dazzling instrumental music with her voice, apart from being able to put all of her soul into singing local songs. She is also an expert on the theory of jazz.

So while the lady sings the blues, you put on those dancing shoes and without pause go and find out what all that jazz is about.

All inquiries of music enthusiasts to Deviana's Profound Jazz Ensemble Training Workshops will be answered at telephone number 79191121.