The Active Voice

Al Jarreau used to jog before every performance — until a few years back, when he began waking up with painful, swollen knees and made the switch to speed-walking. After aching foot tendons slowed him down again, he discovered the stationary bike. “Joints, hair, eyes,” the 68-year-old singer says with a smile, “There’s an age when you have a mutiny of the body.”

At least one crew member hasn’t jumped ship: Jarreau’s voice is as stunning, silken and staggering as ever, with a range and agility that would be impressive at any age. And that’s good news for the thousands of Asian fans who are finally getting the chance to see him live. Although he has performed in Japan in the past, Jarreau is currently touring the region for the first time, calling at six cities including Bangkok and Beijing (where he expects to “pick up some Olympic hangover and pick them up a bit”). He is co-headlining the shows with jazz-guitar great George Benson, and the performances feature solo spots from both artists as well as duets.

The tour kicked off in Seoul on Sept. 2, with Jarreau bedazzling 2,500 fans with classics like Take Five and Mas Que Nada. “There was nothing you could add or take away from the performance.” says Hong In Sung, a twentysomething member of the audience. “It was perfect.” Jarreau and Benson wrapped up the night with their version of the Daryl Hall – penned Paul Young hit Every Time You Go Away. “It was a great night,” says Jarreau. “It was warm and very special.”

An enthusiastic reception in Asia shouldn’t surprise him. In the late 1970s, white-collar Asians in the region’s booming economies sought out new sounds to grace their suddenly affordable turntables and cassette players. Older listeners, bored with rock, began to trade up to West Coast jazz fusion — a connoisseur’s form that mingled jazz, pop, R&B and funk, setting store above all on sheen and virtuosity. Although derided by jazz traditionalists, the genre had an exotic sophistication to middle-class Asian ears — and Jarreau was its house vocalist, his marvel of a voice swooping out of the speakers in Hong Kong penthouses and Tokyo wine bars.

Jarreau has long transcended the fusion label, and in fact a fresh listening of some of his albums of the period — especially the live recording Look to the Rainbow (1977) and its studio follow-up All Fly Home (1978) — reveal them to be masterpieces of risk-taking and exuberance, eluding easy categorization. That’s fitting for a man who remains the only performer to win Grammy Awards in three different styles: pop, R&B and jazz. “He works the cracks between all of those genres,” says San Francisco Chronicle pop-music critic Joel Selvin. But most critics agree that Jarreau’s roots, ultimately, lie in jazz. “What makes him unique is the jazz current — with its inherent sense of swing and improvisational magic — that courses through everything he does, whether it’s pop, R&B or whatever,” says Los Angeles Times critic Don Heckman.

Jarreau first showed signs of vocal prowess at age 4, performing a garden recital in Milwaukee, Wis., where his father was an ordained minister who welded auto frames for a living. As a boy, “young Alwin” (his parents addressed him by his given name) used to sit beside his mother as she played piano in church, and later sang in the choir. Jarreau was bright, and after high school opted to study psychology, earning a masters degree and landing work in San Francisco as a vocational rehabilitation counselor. One problem: “I was a horrible bureaucrat and organizer,” says Jarreau, who quit his job and began eking out a living in the rich jazz scene of late-’60s California instead. It was after a 1974 Los Angeles show, when he opened for the legendary Les McCann, that he scored a record contract, and in 1975 he released his debut album, We Got By, featuring his trademark genre-bending style. An unsuspecting world was also introduced to a voice that one critic likened to “a full orchestra in his throat.”

To those who haven’t heard them, Jarreau’s swooping melody lines and improvisational growls, grunts and inflections can verge on startling. Perhaps more than any popular vocalist alive, he embodies the notion of the voice as a pure instrument. “When he gets into a flat-out jazz setting,” says Heckman, “he lets it all hang out. And when he gets into one of his extended scat solos on something like Take Five, even the instrumentalists’ mouths drop open.”

That very quality, though, has made it difficult for Jarreau to attain megastardom in an industry that relies on pigeonholing performers. He has had some mainstream success — you might remember the Top 40 hits Mornin’ and Moonlighting (the theme from the 1980s TV series of the same name, starring Cybil Shepherd and Bruce Willis). He also performed on the 1985 USA for Africa charity recording We Are the World. But none of Jarreau’s 20 albums or 23 singles have cracked the U.S. Top 10. “When people hear ‘jazz singer,’ they tend to approach with a little nervousness,” he says, “because some jazz has put a bit of distance between the performer and audience.”

Jarreau is guilty of a degree of aloofness himself. He enjoys either silence or classical-music stations. He grumbles about the “flavor-of-the-month mentality” among music fans. And he shows his age — endearingly — by refusing to own an iPod. His strange argument, contradicted every time he draws up a set list comprising songs from different phases of his career, is that you must listen to songs in the context of the album they appear on. “Just to take bits and pieces of this and that I think is not as enriching an experience,” he says. Jarreau is also more than a little blasé about reaching out to fans via the crucial medium of the day, the Internet. The last diary entry on his website, www.aljarreau.com, is dated April 2006.

But then he no longer has anything to prove. “Al’s his own guy,” says Heckman. “You can hear traces of Jon Hendricks in his scatting, some Joe Williams in his blues, some of Ray Charles’ phrasing. But the unique timbre of his voice almost inevitably makes him sound unique.” That kind of stature will help his forthcoming Christmas album — carols are the kind of thing that, let’s face it, only an artist of real untouchability can pull off. It should also ensure a warm welcome for a new “best of” collection, out early next year. “I’m picking up the pace a bit,” he says. “Keeps you visible, so people know not to count you out yet.”

But as much as Jarreau relishes staying active, touring remains tough — so Asian fans ought to cherish the opportunities of the next fortnight. “The hardest things on vocal health are singing and traveling,” he says. He treats his vocal chords to a regimen that begins six hours before a performance, doing push-ups, abdominal work and vocal exercises. “It’s important for a singer to think of himself as an athlete,” says Jarreau. Anything to keep the mutiny at bay.