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By Richard Bourcier

Canadian jazz vocalist Martha Brooks is based in Winnipeg, Manitoba, a municipality that prides itself as being a city of extremes. Anyone who has endured a Winnipeg winter will agree. More than 40 languages are spoken in the city and one of them is “jazz”, a language Martha Brooks speaks with confidence and authority. As this CD is released, Martha is playing the world class Winnipeg Jazz Festival with her trio.

Trained as a coloratura soprano, Brooks has a range of three and a half octaves. Martha is also a playwright, novelist and lyricist. Her talents as a songwriter are showcased nicely on this CD. The team of pianist Knut Haugsoen and Martha Brooks penned five of the eleven songs. Spencer Williams’ “Basin Street Blues” is also given some modern lyric revisions by the vocalist. The quartet has been a part of the local jazz scene for six years.

Like another Canadian jazz vocalist, Holly Cole, Martha Brooks places her personal trademark on any song she performs. Witness her treatment of “Deed I Do” and “Don’t Blame Me.” In spite of its traditionally bouncy demeanor, Brook’s delivery of “Deed I Do” turns the 1926 hit into a sexy and sultry love song. Steve Hamilton’s bass is a prominent part of the quartet’s sound. Hamilton is an outstanding player who has performed with Ranee Lee, Jon Faddis and Eddie Henderson. Knut Haugsoen’s sensitive and truly inventive piano and arranging is classy and enjoyable. Add a passionate drummer like Kelly Marques and listen to the group really cook on something like “How Deep Is The Ocean.” The singer and pianist penned the hauntingly beautiful “Since You’ve Gone” and both perform their composition with deep feelings. This tune is a gem and other originals on this album are equally satisfying. I truly enjoyed this fine CD and think you will too.

THE GLOBE AND MAIL
By JAMES ADAMS

Jazz is perhaps the most literary of musical genres, having inspired writers as varied as Ralph Ellison, Geoffrey Dyer, Jack Kerouac, Tom Piazza, David Huddle and Bart Schneider to write fiction inspired by its practitioners or emulative of what they play.

But it’s rare for a jazz musician to be a writer of fiction, and vice versa. Winnipeg’s Martha Brooks is one of these rarities.

Earlier this week Brooks won the $15,000 Governor-General’s Award for English-language children’s literature for her young-adult novel, True Confessions of a Heartless Girl. It was something like Brooks’s fourth “trip” to the G-Gs in 10 or 11 years but her first victory, and it followed on a three-night stand with a quartet earlier this month at Toronto’s premier jazz club, Top o’ the Senator.

Brooks has been a serious singer of jazz and sometime composer for more than eight years. How serious is perhaps best demonstrated by the fact her most recent and so far only recording, Change of Heart (five original tunes, six covers), won the outstanding jazz album prize at the Prairie Music Awards in September. Her voice — think a thicker, darker-hued Diana Krall cut with Sheila Jordan and Shirley Horn — is going to be heard in February accompanied by the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra, then she’s off to the Reykjavik Jazz Festival in Iceland.

Both sides of the Brooks aesthetic were on display at this week’s Governor-General’s Awards ceremony. After she made her one-minute acceptance speech, she sang a cappella Stella by Starlight, the Victor Young-Ned Washington classic with its lyrics about “the murmur of a brook at eventide/That ripples by a nook where two lovers hide.”

“I’d been vocalizing that morning, which I always do,” she recalled from her Winnipeg home a couple of days afterward. “And I was humming it [Stella]; it’s such a beautiful piece of music.” Later, at the sound check for the ceremony, the lyrics for Bye Bye Blackbird “bubbled up from [her] unconscious” and she sang those into the microphone. Gordon Platt, the Canada Council’s literary officer, suggested with a chuckle that she sing her acceptance speech.Brooks thought probably not, but the idea had been planted: 10 minutes before she took the podium, she decided, “I’m going to sing Stella by Starlight.”

Brooks actually has been singing longer than she has been writing. In fact, singing was prescribed for her in the early sixties as a way of preparing her for surgery for a congenital thoracic defect. Before the surgery, her childhood years had been plagued by bouts of pneumonia and chronic bronchitis. With the operation, “they broke my heart bone and I found my two heart’s voices, writing and singing.” Brooks acknowledges that, after publishing eight acclaimed works of fiction, the music side of her life “is starting to heat up. I’m still feeling in control of it; there’s an interesting balance between it and the writing. But who knows? Who says control is such a good thing anyhow?”

STYLE MANITOBA
By RANDALL McILROY

These are hard times for understatement in jazz vocalizing, when attitude is so often confused with the essence. With more lungs than most, there was never any doubt that Winnipeg’s Martha Brooks had the chops, but that power and her penchant for drama – she is an award-winning author, after all – might have overwhelmed the material in her debut, Change of Heart. No worries there. Building on a rapport with pianist/co-writer Knut Haugsoen in particular but also trusting to the redoubtable bassist Steve Hamilton and percussionist Kelly Marques, Brooks has fun with feeling. The five original songs encourage investigation rather than grandstanding (check the handsome Trinidad and wry Lip Sync). The standards are chosen well and plumbed adroitly; it’s how you tell them.

Her own change of heart: Martha Brooks adds jazz singer to her CV at a time in life most think of retiring: (National Edition)

Canton, Jeffrey. National Post (Don Mills, Ont) 30 June 2001: W2

Can anyone at age 57 truly be called up-and-coming? Well, if you are an award-winning writer who’s embarked on an increasingly successful career as a jazz singer, then yes.After years as a writer, Martha Brooks last month released her first CD, Change of Heart. She regularly performs with her trio at Ms. Purdys, a Winnipeg jazz club. And recently, she was one of the featured performers in the Winnipeg Jazz Festival’s tribute to jazz legend Thelonious Monk.

What’s remarkable is that Brooks has forged this place for herself in the jazz world over the past six years — after age 50. It’s been an odd journey for Brooks, since she is known as one of Canada’s finest writers for teens with such novels as A Hill for Looking and Two Moons in August, as well as her short story collection Travelling on into the Light. She is a three-time Governor General’s Award nominee and has won both the Mr. Christie’s Book Award and the Ruth Schwartz Children’s Book Award. Two of her novels, Two Moons in August and Being with Henry, have recently been optioned for feature films. Now she hopes to have similar success as a jazz singer.

“Music drove me nuts as a kid,” Brooks says with a laugh over the phone from her home in Winnipeg. “When I was four, I fell madly in love with syncopation. I grew up listening to swing.” She also grew up on the grounds of a tuberculosis sanatorium, where her father was a surgeon, in Ninette in southwestern Manitoba.

“My older sister listened to [swing]. I heard it on the radio, drifting out of the windows of the sanatorium. There were concerts for the patients and staff that always included a pickup band. My father played the violin. Ours was a musical household.

“And there was John, one of Dad’s patients, who was a stride piano player. He taught me to sing Josephine and You Won’t Be Satisfied Until You Break My Heart. He and his family would spend weekends with us and I vividly remember I could barely wait for him to finish his breakfast so he could go the piano and play some of this fabulous music that made me leap out of my skin and dance around so full of joy I thought I’d burst. I even had a chance to cut a record! Some guy, travelling the countryside recording golden family moments for posterity, coerced me into singing The North Wind Doth Blow. I got halfway through — with a lot of background coaxing from Mom and Dad — and clammed up on the rest. I still have the record.”

While Brooks started singing seriously in her teens, she wasn’t singing jazz. Born with a depressed sternum, she underwent corrective chest surgery when she was 18. “Afterwards,” she explains, “Dad prescribed singing to speed along my recovery. I began voice training as a coloratura soprano. The lessons stretched my range and ability far beyond anything any of us had anticipated.”

In 1963, at age 19, Brooks moved to Winnipeg, where she met her husband, Brian (they have a daughter, Kirsten), and began writing. It wasn’t until the ’80s, though, that Brooks began singing seriously again, and hooked up with Winnipeg jazz legend Jimmy King. “He was appalled that I had been neglecting singing,” says Brooks, adding gleefully, “and he proceeded to help me, in his words, ‘move your voice from the attic to the basement.’ After about a year I started doing gigs with him. He was a mentor and a musical father to me.”

Just short of her 51st birthday, in the midst of writing her novel Bone Dance, Brooks began having disturbing dreams that seemed to focus on her failure to pursue a singing career. “Time was running out for me if I was going to sing jazz seriously,” she says. “Duke Ellington once told Tony Bennett, who was wrestling with the idea of pursuing careers as both a singer and a painter, ‘Do two things instead of one, because if you do one thing, you get burnt out.’ And once I made the decision to sing, all my fears dissolved. I have been healthier since I started to woo the jazz in my soul and my writing has been more flowing.”

Since then, Brooks has worked hard to develop her own style as a jazz vocalist and it’s paid off. She’s got a deliciously coy voice that entices the listener into the heart of the songs she’s performing. She has drawn from the best jazz vocalists, bringing to her music the confidence, clarity and vocal range of a virtuoso such as Sarah Vaughan — Brooks herself has a three-and-a-half-octave range — combined with the wry humour of Betty Carter and the silky smoothness of Shirley Horn. She’s equally adept at breathing new life into such classic standards as How Deep is the Ocean and Just for a Thrill as she is at making the original jazz pieces on her album feel like they’re already classics.

Brooks acknowledges that she’s not alone in making the CD. She has a particularly special working relationship with pianist and composer Knut Haugsoen. “I’d always resisted writing lyrics, out of respect for the good ones, like Lush Life or I Thought About You. But Knut’s compositions were so beautiful, elegant and compelling, such a gift, really, that I soon found I couldn’t resist playing with them. Once that happened, of course, I was hooked, ultimately penning words for seven of his tunes, five of which appear on Change of Heart.”

So where does she go from here? Well, she’s learning a new Haugsoen composition, tentatively called Silk, and she and the guys have performances booked throughout the summer.

“In a sense,” Brooks adds thoughtfully, pausing as if to ensure she’s got the words exactly right, “I’ve been playing with sound all my artistic life. I’ve always written like a musician — aware of the rhythmic patterns of words, and how certain arrangements and patterns will fall on the inner ear of my readers. It isn’t such a stretch, really, this hopping from one art form to another. It’s just another joyful method of communicating what I have to say.”