Jazz duo Tuck & Patti make beautiful music on and off stage ____________________________________________________________

Singapore hummed to the beat of jazz last weekend during the first Singapore International Jazz Festival. Held at the Suntec City Convention Center from May 18 to May 20, the festival drew crowds of people, including confirmed jazz lovers and those curious to hear more of a musical form still alien to the ears of many in the region. The Jakarta Post's Bruce Emond visited the festival courtesy of main sponsor Singapore Airlines to listen in on the goings-on. _______________________________________________________________

SINGAPORE (JP): Singer Patti Cathcart is all about reaching out and touching the heart.

She does it all the time, up on stage as one half of the acclaimed jazz duo Tuck & Patti with her husband guitarist Tuck Andress and, most personally, in life.

"I've been thinking and praying for you ever since we met," the San Francisco native says as she greets another guest at the welcome luncheon for the festival, putting a hand out and lightly placing it on the person's chest.

"You really touched my heart."

Group hug everybody? From many other people in the showbiz community, it might seem like the warm-and-fuzzy ego strokings of a celebrity.

But from Patti, who says music is her "surrender to God", it appears nothing less than the spontaneous act of a deeply spiritual person who genuinely cares about others.

It's a quality that comes through in her velvety vocals, whether it is in a heart-rending rendition of My Romance or a contemporary jazz reprise of Cyndy Lauper's Time After Time.

For the latter song, Patti became a gentle task-master at the festival, coaxing even the most reluctant in the sold-out main stadium last Saturday night to sing along with her on the haunting chorus.

Moments like these, Tuck and Patti said in an interview before their weekend performance, make the long hours of travel to stops around the world, of impersonal hotel rooms and being away from their San Francisco base, all worthwhile.

"We've worked out that we're actually working the equivalent of a 40-hour week, when you take into account things like getting from the hotel to the airport, travel and practice time," Tuck said.

"But the musical experience is so intense that it sees us through everything else."

"And," he adds tellingly, "we're together."

Now in their early 40s, they have been a partnership for the last 23 years, bringing the combination of her soothing, alternately sultry vocals and his innovative guitar instrumentals to the albums Tears of Joy (1988), Love Warriors (1989), Dream (1991), Learning How to Fly (1995), Paradise Found (1998) and, most recently, Taking the Long Way Home.

They met in 1978 when Patti came to sing in a band which included Tulsa-born Tuck, a student at Stanford University in the San Francisco Bay Area.

They knew immediately they were meant to be a team.

"Most jazz musicians are in and out of bands, but for us it was a rare case of instantly knowing we wanted to have a lifetime collaboration," Tuck says. "We started playing together at a club, and we've really never looked back."

As an interracial couple, they have also had to occasionally deal with racism, most often, Patti says, unspoken and expressed in a sneering look.

"We didn't grow up in racist families and we have surrounded ourselves with people who don't have those views, and it's mostly been absent from our personal experiences, but you can find it (racism) wherever you go," she says.

"At some point we should be angry about it, and look at it as absurd and unbelievable that this kind of thing is still happening today."

That is where their music comes in, bringing people together regardless of where they come from or what they look like.

Tuck and Patti are always there for each other, but they acknowledged that living in and out of each other's pockets sometimes takes its toll in arguments.

They do their best to keep the personal separate from the professional as much as possible.

"You couldn't continue a ridiculous fight on stage by not talking to each other -- the love supports the music, and the music supports the love," Patti says.

"But music doesn't have to follow a script, so sometimes things will come out in a chorus or a word. We have just learned to fight efficiently."

Interest

Tuck and Patti are heartened by the burgeoning interest in jazz in the region, including a crop of younger Asian jazz bands making themselves heard.

They credit it partly to major record labels making a decision in the mid-1990s to put jazz, classical and world music into a single category, thereby bringing it into the musical mainstream.

The duo makes regular trips to Japan, where jazz has long enjoyed a small but enthusiastic following, but now other parts of Asia are opening up to the music form.

The festival, the only major jazz festival in the region after the music died for Jakarta's JakJazz with the Asian economic crisis in 1997, was the brainchild of Singapore Airlines (SIA) senior executive vice president Michael Tan, says the company's vice president of public relations Rick Clements.

"He loves jazz music himself and has long had a dream of having such a festival, of bringing jazz to people on the street who maybe have no idea about the music," Clements said.

He added the festival, which included three outdoor locations showcasing free performances by artists including Indonesia's Ireng Maulana and MUTU, was part of SIA's efforts to promote culture and the arts.

Tuck and Patti were pleased to be part of a main program which included such stalwarts as guitarist Lee Ritenour, saxophonist Ernie Watts, bass player and singer Eldee Young and vocalist Vanessa Rubin.

"We're so excited about the festival, and there is an energy happening in Asia, that things are really taking off," Patti says, noting the thriving jazz scenes in Beijing and Shanghai.

They would also like to return to Indonesia, where they have performed in Jakarta, Bandung and Surabaya in the past.

"We had a plan to visit Indonesia recently but our promoter said it was just not the right time," Tuck says. "But we love the place and the people -- they are so gentle -- so we really hope to go back there soon."