It’s a winning combination that’s taken her from local cocktail lounges to Carnegie Hall, major European Jazz festivals and onstage at her own Barbara Morrison Performing Arts Center, a thriving cultural hub in Leimart Park that is just about to celebrate its fifth anniversary. Morrison’s vocals, as heard on her superb new CD, “A Sunday Kind of Love” (Savant), mix coolly communicative passion with artful, luxurious phrasing and plenty of steam-heated soul. And it was rich, a very rich experience.” At the time, I didn’t even know who they were, but they’d start drinking and telling these great stories about Billie Holiday and Dinah Washington, all the people who came before me. “Here I was, just a 21-year-old kid hanging out with these 70-year-olds, all of them were stars from the old days. The Rubaiyat was one of the most historic, and prestigious, jazz and R&B clubs in South Central Los Angeles with the popular Blue Mondays headlined by legendary saxophonist Eddie “Cleanhead” Vinson and able cohorts the Blevins brothers. Everyone there was old enough to be my parents, but they were also playing the best music I’d heard in my life - and somehow I won the post.” But I heard about an audition for a night club performer’s job, at the Rubaiyat on Pico and Western. And when I first got here, I was singing in a rock band called L.A. “I’m from the Detroit area and grew up listening to a lot of Motown. “I wasn’t even into jazz until I moved to California,” the 60-year-old Morrison said recently. But Morrison, who appears at Burbank’s Joe’s Great American Bar & Grill on May 26, remains an unassuming, modest and very down-to-earth character. One of Los Angeles’ top jazz vocalists, Morrison made her bones on the bandstand alongside the top names in music, performing with everyone from Johnny Otis to Ray Charles, Mel Torme and Dizzy Gillespie.
While Barbara Morrison’s 1973 arrival to the jazz and blues party was somewhat late, the singer has definitely lived it to the hilt.
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