MP3 Bett Butler - Myths & Fables

Drawing from progressive jazz, earthy blues, Brazilian music, and traditions of chamber music and art songs, story-telling songwriter Bett Butler follows an offbeat assortment of characters through wild exterior and interior journeys.

13 MP3 Songs
JAZZ: Contemporary Jazz, JAZZ: Jazz Vocals

Show all album songs: Myths & Fables Songs


Details:
Recuerdos
(More than you ever wanted to know....)

Bett Butler still remembers the morning they delivered the dusty old upright piano, badly in need of tuning. Three years old at the time, she immediately attempted to imitate what she heard around her: the crazy mix of musical treasures her father scoured from second-hand stores, platters serving up Billie Holiday and Beethoven, Ernesto Lecuona and Louis Armstrong, Willie Nelson, Ray Charles, the Platters, the Andrews Sisters. The living room became a refuge from the smoggy Houston air that took her breath away, a magical place where imagination soared on sound.

She made her stage debut at age four, on a family vacation, in a swank nightclub in Mexico City. Bett still remembers the room: the noir glow of blue and violet lights, the elegant heads bowed in intimate conversation over icy cocktail glasses, the mammoth grand piano, black and shiny as a limousine. She played âBoogie Woogie,â a piece sheâd heard her older sister practice for piano lessons, to a rousing ovation. (She still blesses the tolerant trio of tuxedoed musicians who invited her onstage that night.) But the pleasure came as much from the place as from the applause; it was a place of magic and mystery and sophistication, like in the old movies she loved to watch at the Santa Rosa Theater.

As Bett grew older, that sense of place was also fed by the stories she voraciously read. Her father had started teaching her to read before kindergarten, using reprints of the same readers he had learned from decades ago in a one-room schoolhouse in deep East Texas. The family had a modest but determined library: beefy, faux-leather-bound encyclopedias with quaint drawings, short stories by Guy de Maupassant and OâHenry, the complete works of Shakespeare and Edgar Allan Poe, Aesopâs Fables and the bizarre tales of the Brothers Grimm. Her conservative parents closely monitored the movies she was allowed to see, but she snuck steamy paperbacks like Orwellâs 1984 and Ayn Randâs The Fountainhead off the top shelf when they werenât looking and devoured their exotic contents in secret. A natural night owl, she would read with a flashlight under the covers long after her parents had gone to bed.

As a teenager, Bett spent hours prowling the libraries and art museums in downtown Houston, savoring the fragrance of moldy books and drinking in the rich colors of Gauguin and Degas while her mother, a genealogist, did research. Her bedroom and furniture were painted in those colors, sea greens and blues and brilliant oranges, and a print of Renoirâs âGirl with a Watering Canâ hung on her wall. Her grandmother, who had dropped out of finishing school to marry a man who worked on Gulf Coast oil rigs, took her to the ballet and theater. She discovered the low end of the FM dial, the college and public radio stations that played Charles Mingus and Stan Getz and Billie Holiday and flamenco and the drummers of Burundi. She was also beginning to make money as a musician, singing at banquets and weddings and writing and performing gospel music for tent revivals.

In high school, Bett Butler was a theater geek. Acting enabled her to live the stories she read. Things seemed to come easily to her, and she rebelled against the piano lessons sheâd taken since she was seven, took up guitar, and argued with her father about politics and war (as if she knew anything about either). An honor student, she was almost suspended for performing an anti-war piece at a PTA meeting. At the dinner table the next evening, when her war veteran father tried to explain why everyone was so upset, she saw him cry for the first time. It was the only time he had ever mentioned his wartime experience.

Bett went to Trinity University in San Antonio on scholarship, planning to major in theater, and instinctively switched to music at the last minute. She suffered an identity crisis and moved into a religious commune for a semester, where she quickly discovered her unsuitability for cloistered life. She moved back into the dorm, chaffing against the stuffy rigor of classical training, and spent most of her time listening to Billie Holiday and Bessie Smith records and the schoolâs jazz radio station. A film student loaned her his musician fatherâs fake book, full of jazz standards, which she devoured. (She still has the fake book.)

After graduating (barely), Bett began working at the downtown Melodrama Theater, playing Scarlett OâHara in a send-up of Gone with the Wind. It was good training; the audience heckled and threw popcorn, and she learned to be thick-skinned and quick with a sarcastic retort. Other roles at other theaters followed: Roxanne in Cyrano de Bergerac and the title role in Lysistrata. She wrote and produced several musicals and worked as an accompanist, married impulsively, and divorced three years later.

Bett played in local clubs as a soloist, singing tunes by Gershwin and Cole Porter and Irving Berlin. A friend introduced her to a somewhat questionable promoter, who told her to write some country songs, get a band together, and he would let her open for a nationally-known act. She did so. The promoter ran off with the money before paying the band. From that experience, she learned several expensive but valuable lessons:

1. Donât try to be something youâre not.
2. Know the people youâre dealing with.
3. Always get a written contract.
4. You gotta pay the band.

Bett was working happy hour as a soloist at a popular club called Arthurâs when she noticed the musician who played with the Monday late-night trio. Tall, dark, and well-dressed, he would come in quietly, take his fretless electric bass out of its beautiful leather bag, and warm up, silently playing scales up and down the fretboard. She thought, âThatâs the kind of musician I want to be when I grow up.â A drummer friend told her he was Joël Dilley, a first-call studio musician, staff bassist for the Carver Cultural Center and the Southwest Guitar Conservatory, and urged her to call him for the trio gigs she was just beginning to book. âHeâd never play with me,â she answered. âIâm just starting out.â

Four or five very bad bassists later, she called him. Theyâve been playing together ever since.

Joëlâwho had played professionally since age twelve, toured with nationally-known groups while still in high school, and produced and engineered several recordsâwas a kind mentor and teacher. Playing jazz trio gigs in Houston, San Antonio, and Austin, their friendship deepened into love, and they married. While living in Houston, he produced and arranged her first single, âHeâs a Man, He Never Cries.â Eventually, they moved back to San Antonio and formed Mandala Music Production and independent co-op label Dragon Lady Records. Their first releases were recorded in a makeshift home studio. Vocal parts were recorded in the bathroom, which had excellent acoustics. They hung blankets from the ceiling and propped the mattress against the windows in the bedroom to record drums.

Bett began playing solo blues and jazz during happy hour six days a week at Dickâs Last Resort, a rowdy roadhouse on the world-famous Riverwalk, where flying debris and drunken heckling were the norm. Every night was sink or swim, and she learned crowd control and vocal stamina. She released two albums, which sold well to the tourists who came there from all over the world: Songs for Dickâs Last Resort, full of original novelty numbers, and Short Stories, a mix of jazz and blues originals which earned a three-star ârecommendedâ rating from All Music Guide, noting âButler's uncommon compositional and performing ability to work successfully with diverse musical themes and within a variety of frameworks,â and critical acclaim from John Swenson of United Press International, who raved âBett Butler brought me to that place where music can salve the deepest wound, mend the heart most broken.â

Bett and Joël continued recording, adding other artists to the Dragon Lady roster and eventually moving their studio into a warehouse space into San Antonio's historic King William arts district. Playing at Dickâs for fourteen years made her fearless, and she left to concentrate on writing and performing with Joël and trumpet player Cecil R. Carter in the Chamber Jazz Trio. She researched San Antonioâs rich jazz history, authored a column âThe Jazz Undergroundâ for the short-lived arts magazine Perla, wrote about jazz for the alternative weekly The Current, and maintained a website and weekly e-mail newsletter This Week in Jazz, promoting San Antonioâs rich underground jazz scene. She regularly played regional venues like San Antonioâs JazzâsAlive and NIOSA, and the Texas Jazz Festival in Corpus Christi.

Bett took a job as Writers in Communities Director for Gemini Ink, a non-profit literary arts organization, where she worked with world-class writers and poets on a daily basis. She also directed and performed in Gemini Inkâs prestigious readers theater program, where she scored original music for productions complimenting exhibits at the McNay and Witte Museums and the San Antonio Museum of Art. Highlights included her jazz-inflected, sung/spoken reading of Allen Ginsbergâs Howl, with Joël on solo bass, and the original song âFor Gabrieleâ (included on her new release Myths & Fables), which she wrote for an exhibit of work by Expressionist painter Gabriele Münter. Bett also directed and acted in playwright Sterling Houstonâs acclaimed piece Black & Blue: 400 Years of Struggle and Transcendence in city-wide celebrations of black culture and Austinâs Black Arts Movement Festival. Commissioned by the International Festival Institute at Round Top, Bett and Joël collaborated with nationally-known poets Li-Young Lee and Rosemary Catacalos to create original jazz settings of Leeâs work for performances at the Southwest School of Art and Craft and the 6th Annual Poetry Festival at Round Top. (âPraise Them,â the final tune on Myths & Fables, sprang from that collaboration.)

With her latest album Myths & Fables, Bett Butler enters a new phase of life and work. It captures, in a unique voice, the magic of the stories she loved and lived. Like category-defying songwriters Joni Mitchell, Cassandra Wilson, and Abbey Lincoln, she refuses confinement to formula. Itâs all about the story, the song, and the character; and wherever they go, she goes. In this album, she follows an offbeat assortment of stories, songs, and characters: the artist who dreams of flying beyond the stifling domesticity demanded by her lover in âFor Gabriele;â
small-town residents still reeling from a generations-old suicide in âSecrets;â a saucy broad demanding equal satisfaction in âIt Ainât Over âtil Itâs Over.â (And every pet lover will recognize the âAngel in a Dog Suit.â)

But her aversion to the predictable doesnât stop there. The dark political fable âGrim Fairy Taleâ bounces along as a happy samba. A soaring solo by Finnish fusion guitarist Jartse Tuominen turns the tragic folk song âSecretsâ into a rousing rock anthem. And âNothinâ to Be Proud Of,â a clarion call to conscience, is delivered with gentle, childlike innocence. Producer/bassist/composer Joël Dilley uses instrumentation, placement, and effects cinematically, creating the perfect aural mise en scène for each story, transporting the listener to the alcohol numbed claustrophobia of âWhen Love Has Left the Roomâ or a lonely plaza where distant voices echo in his own composition âRecuerdos.â Slide guitarist Gib Wharton brings the same eerie noir quality that he contributed to Cassandra Wilsonâs Blue Light âtil Dawn. Co-producer/trumpet player Cecil R. Carter, former Gatemouth Brown drummer Lloyd Herrman, percussionist t bow Gonzales, saxophonist Richard Oppenheim, and guitarist Polly Harrison round out the list of first-call musicians who tell their own side of each story in this extremely sophisticated collection of Myths & Fables.

The album won a performance grant from the Artist Foundation, and Bettâs song âWhen Love Has Left the Roomâ won First Placeâout of 10,000 entriesâin the Jazz Category of the much-lauded International Songwriting Competition (ISC).

Ask Bett Butler whatâs next, and sheâll tell you that sheâs still trying do the same thing she did when they delivered that first piano. âIâm just trying to make sense what I hear around me,â she says. âThere are no new ideasâonly new ways of combining old ones. The only difference between then and now is the amount of data coming in. Iâm still just trying to put it all together.

âMaybeâ¦somedayâ¦Iâll get it right.â