The 'real jazz mama' on tour here

By Mehru Jaffer

JAKARTA (JP): Monica Crosby loves quaffing tea almost as much as she loves music. But she had to travel all the way to Indonesia to fully appreciate what goes into the growing and harvesting of tea.

"The efforts of all those women working in the fields! For the first time in my life I saw what it takes to make tea," says Florida's first lady of jazz after a drive through the tea plantations of Puncak. There she saw firsthand hundreds of women laboring in the heat.

"I stepped out of the car and looked around at the lush green hills, at all the leaves the workers have to pluck. The sight was overwhelming".

Sightseeing is something that Monica is allowed to do only in her spare time when she is not performing before growing legions of fans in Jakarta.

"Monica is the result of a five-year search by the Regent Hotel to find a real jazz maestro to perform in its lounge. We have had jazz music before but only by local musicians. Monica is the real thing," says an excited Nuni Sutyoko-Rasad -- a public relations manager -- as she introduces the 51-year-old singer who is performing in Asia for the first time.

Monica has done a lot of Top 40 music in the past and enjoyed the energy, choreography and the traveling that went with it. But after having rocked as a former Ikette with the Ike and Tina Turner Revue, all she really wants to do now is sit on a stool and sing lyrics that make sense. She feels more and more comfortable with rhythm and blues. "I am not saying that rock and that kind of music doesn't make sense. But a lot of time it can get out of hand. I find it kind of screamy, deafening and I am unable to understand what is being conveyed. I prefer words like, The very thought of you... and I forget to do... the ordinary things that I ought to do..."

And those who have heard her sing in Jakarta aren't complaining. In fact she has been making sense since she arrived in February to anyone who prefers the standard classics of jazz to the often mind-deadening sounds of rock and roll.

Evolved partly from spirituals sung by slaves, jazz remains the only truly American form of music, created by African- Americans for African-Americans.

The word jazz was first spotted in print in a San Francisco newspaper in 1913. According to the Chronicle of Jazz by Mervyn Cooke, it has sexual connotations and is thought to be a derivation of the word "orgasm" which in slang was shortened to "jasm". Sometime around 1915 several bands added the provocative expletive Jass to their names. The original Dixieland Jass Band eventually dropped the double "s" and replaced it with "zz" after pranksters kept erasing the letter "j" from their posters!

Notwithstanding the libidinous origins of the word, Monica says that jazz means everything to her today. It is her life, love, pleasure and relaxation.

She started singing at the age of five, but in order to support herself and her four children she spent most of her life doing whatever work was necessary -- and this includes teaching, being a mail carrier and a clerk in an accounting office.

"As kids we were too poor to take lessons in singing. Nobody taught my mother to sing and nobody taught music to us. My 77- year-old mother is still a much-loved gospel singer in her home town in Arizona," she says.

In 1994, when she could finally afford to, she went to a music school for lessons. When the teacher heard her sing and said, "Monica why don't you go home. Please do not try to fix what is not broken."

So Monica did just that, and she continues to be popular not just throughout the United States but in Puerto Rico, the Bahamas, Mexico and the Netherlands as well. She is happy to be singing full time as a career and says that she wasted far too much time and energy on two ex-husbands. Her children are adults now and she is ecstatic about being able to do something she loves for a living.

"Don't ever look at me as the dollar sign for I'm a treble clef from top to toe," she warns friends and fans as soon as she sees them getting that silly look in their eyes.

Her visit to Jakarta materialized out of the blue when another singer asked her for a favor one day. "Sure," she said without realizing she was being asked to live in Indonesia for four months. "It's so far away," was her first reaction. But, unlike many Americans, Monica knows something about the history and culture of Indonesia, for as a child in school she singled out Indonesia as the subject for a project report. "I chose Indonesia because I saw a smiling face in a copy of National Geographic, and also because the country seemed to be covered with flowers".

When she was asked to come here last February she was reminded of this and thought to herself, "Deja-vu, perhaps ...?"

She has seen and read much about the recent struggle of the Indonesian people, and says, "I am a people's person and no television pictures, no matter how violent, can scare me away from other people." She adds that it was never a fear of people that made her think twice about coming here. It was just the distance.

Since her music is born directly out of the hardships of slavery in America, she cannot imagine performing in a place that frowns on freedom of expression, and she is happy to be singing in a more tolerant, liberal Indonesia. Monica wants more than anything to soak in the Indonesian experience as much as possible before she leaves at the end of May, so she can croon what promises to be her greatest achievement as a vocalist -- a song that mingles the music of Indonesia with that of her homeland.