Cynthia Wooley • Albuquerque The Magazine • March 2005

JAZZ SULTRY SISTERS: Duke City Jazz Divas

A true jazz diva takes you to a world that you never want to leave. A world lined with smoky romance, well-made cocktails, and unforgettable moments. To be a Duke City Diva, each time you sing a song you must move your audience into the sultry world of jazz. Patty Stephens, Bernadette Seacrest, and Cathryn McGill are a few of Albuquerque’s divas. Although at times they may be singing the same tune, ATM discovers that the songs are never quite the same.

… Behind a dimly-lit corner of the bar, a spotlight shines and dances on the skin of Bernadette Seacrest, Albuquerque’s newest chanteuse. “there’s a physical feeling to singing jazz you don’t get from anything else, even chocolate or sex,” says Seacrest. She is dressed in red velvet, and what appear to be bits of lingerie are really tattoos running all along her chest and arms. Seacrest is a vision from the ‘40s, a classic beauty with a contemporary twist. Her voice comes at you like Billie Holiday on a train that started in the pre-civil rights South and alighted in the 21st-century Southwest.

The sizzling songbird is know for her torchy style of singing, her vintage clothes and yes, her tattoos, which cover most of her body. “I like contradiction,” she says. Seacrest grew up in Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York and got her first tattoo at age 17. “I was exposed to a lot of stuff at an early age; my parents and their friends were hippies and artists,” she said. In L.A. she worked as a fashion designer for punk rock bands.

She claims she owes her biggest debt to Stephens, her voice teacher, and David Parlato, her first accompanist. Bassist Parlato, (who has accompanied musicians by the names of Bacharach, Mancini, Streisand and Zappa in L.A.) and Seacrest worked for a year on jazz standards before they started performing. Prior to that, Seacrest was a singer in a rockabilly band called the Long Goners. Seacrest now plays with her band, the Yes Men, and they released their first CD in 2004 titled No More Music by the Suckers. Michael Grimes her bass player also wrote several songs on the CD; the rest of the songs are mainly jazz standards. They can be heard at jazz venues around town like Martini Grille on Central and at Swig in Santa Fe.

Seacrest struggled with issues of abuse and addiction, like the singer she most admires, Billie Holiday. She feels a growing responsibility as a singer in terms of the lyrical content she sings. Next up for Seacrest is writing her own material. “I want to have a voice for those issues,” she said.

DIVINE LYRICS: The divas offer up the best

… Bernadette Seacrest says Strange Fruit by Billie Holiday is “the greatest song ever written—it’s metaphor for any kind of oppression.” On her CD Seacrest’s voice echoes Holiday’s phrasing as she sings the haunting words of lynchings in the South: “Southern trees bear a strange fruit: blood on the leaves and blood at the root…”