Diane Joan Schuur (born December 10, 1953), nicknamed "Deedles", is an American jazz singer and pianist. As of 2015, Schuur had released 23 albums, and had extended her jazz repertoire to include essences of Latin, gospel, pop and country music. Her most successful album is Diane Schuur & the Count Basie Orchestra, which remained number one on the Billboard Jazz Charts for 33 weeks. She won Grammy Awards for best female jazz vocal performance in both 1986 and 1987 and has had three other Grammy nominations.
Schuur has performed in venues such as Carnegie Hall, The Kennedy Center, and the White House, and has performed with many artists including Ray Charles, Frank Sinatra, Quincy Jones, and Stevie Wonder. Co-performers on Schuur's albums have included Barry Manilow, José Feliciano, Maynard Ferguson, Stan Getz, Vince Gill, Alison Krauss, and B.B. King. Her album with B.B. King was number one on the Billboard Jazz Charts. She was Johnny Carson's guest on NBC's The Tonight Show eleven times.
Schuur has been blind from birth due to retinopathy of prematurity. She has absolute pitch and a clear vocal tone. In 1996, she was a guest performer on Sesame Street, where she was interviewed by Elmo and described to him how a blind person can learn to use other senses to adapt in the world. In 2000 she was awarded the Helen Keller Achievement Award by the American Foundation for the Blind.
Early life Schuur was born on December 10, 1953, in Tacoma, Washington, two months premature and weighing less than three pounds. Complications of prematurity resulted in her total loss of vision. Her twin brother, David, had normal vision at birth but some hearing loss. She also has a younger sister. Schuur grew up in Auburn, Washington, a southern suburb of Seattle. She attended the Washington School for the Blind in Vancouver from age four to eleven. She lived at school but was able to commute home 150 miles on the train by herself. She later transferred to public school where teachers' aides helped her keep up in class.
Musical beginnings Schuur started singing when she was about four years old. Her mother, who died when Schuur was 13, loved jazz and had a Duke Ellington record collection. Her father, a police captain, was an amateur musician who often played piano with his daughter sitting by his side. Schuur stated, "As far back as I can remember, singing was in my blood. My parents loved music, and I loved to sing. I was scatting at an early age". She has absolute pitch. Schuur listened to the radio avidly in her youth; her early musical idols were Sarah Vaughan and Dinah Washington. She said that as a small child she would often retreat to a closet to sing.
Schuur first learned to play the piano by ear. Though she later learned to read braille-written music, she found its use frustrating and impractical since it took away use of one of her hands while playing the piano; however, she frequently used braille-transcribed lyrics in performances and during recording sessions. One of her first public performances was at age ten, singing country music at Tacoma's Holiday Inn; a booking arranged by her aunt. Even when she was a student at the Washington School for the Blind, she would come home on weekends, perform on Friday and Saturday nights and take a train back to school for Monday classes.
At age 15 she was taken by her father to Lake Tahoe to audition as a lounge singer at Harrah's hotel and casino. She got the job, but her widowed father found it impossible to leave his job at the police force to chaperone her, and the offer had to be declined. Schuur was noticed by country music singer/actor Jimmy Wakely, who met her in an Elks Club in 1971 when she was eighteen. After auditioning for him, Wakely arranged a recording session in California. Accompanied by her sister, Schuur took her first airplane trip to the session in Burbank, and made a 45 rpm record of a song called "Dear Mommy and Daddy". Schuur performed locally a great deal in her late teens, and had started to develop a distinctive musical voice. Entertainment writer Stewart Weiner called it a "crystal-clear vocal tone hitting every note in the center of the bull's eye."
Discovery In 1975, at age 22, Schuur auditioned for drummer/bandleader Ed Shaughnessy. Escorted by her twin brother, she went backstage to seek out Shaughnessy after he had finished a concert in Seattle with bandleader Doc Severinsen. Shaughnessy said, "Doc's concert was over and this young blind girl comes in and sits down at the Fender Rhodes keyboard and starts singing the blues. Well, my hair stood on end!" He hired her to be the vocalist in his orchestra, "Energy Force". Jazz trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie heard her and, in 1979, invited her to sit in on a set at the Monterey Jazz Festival. According to Dave Gelly in his 2002 book, Stan Getz: Nobody Else But Me, Schuur's performance created "a minor sensation".
Despite this success, the Shaughnessy connection was not the breakthrough she had hoped for. Schuur failed to impress bandleader Doc Severinsen, who turned her down when she auditioned for a guest spot on Johnny Carson's Tonight Show. Some people in the industry dubbed her "Lady Overkill" because she had a tendency to oversing or tried to put everything she knew into a brief space. For the next three years, Schuur performed in clubs and sharpened her skills. Jazz saxophonist Stan Getz, who had been impressed when he heard her sing "Amazing Grace" at Monterey in 1979, did not give up on her. He became her advisor and coach. Discussing Getz in this role, Schuur stated, "he really was a mentor of mine. He taught me that less is more."
Schuur recorded her first album, Pilot of my Destiny, in 1981 in Seattle on the independent label, Great American Records. It included some of her original compositions and Getz performed on it. Entertainment writer Michael Hoffman, writing in the Arizona Daily Star, said the album suffered from "poor production and distribution" and did not do very well. The album has become a collector's item since the original masters were lost. It was re-released on the MIM Label in 1982, on vinyl only.
Breakthrough In the early 1980s, Stan Getz remained a behind-the-scenes mover who arranged a second appearance for Schuur at the Monterey Jazz Festival. In 1982, he invited her to perform with him in a music showcase at the White House during the Reagan administration. The performance was part of a series designed to encourage established jazz musicians to introduce young artists whom they believe have exceptional potential. Schuur, then 29 years old, was the only vocalist on the bill, appearing and performing with eminent instrumentalists Itzhak Perlman, Dizzy Gillespie, Chick Corea, and Stan Getz. After the performance, Nancy Reagan rushed to embrace Schuur. Mrs. Reagan had invited George H. W. Bush and Barbara Bush to attend this performance. President Reagan was not there but wrote Schuur a personal letter afterwards.
The White House performance was televised, giving Schuur a much broader audience. Producer Larry Rosen happened to see the broadcast and was impressed by her performance. Rosen and his business partner, musician Dave Grusin, set out to find Schuur by contacting Stan Getz. This led to a recording contract with GRP Records. Nancy Reagan invited Schuur to perform at the White House a second time, for a "Ladies of the Senate" luncheon in 1987, where she performed as a vocalist with the Count Basie Orchestra. She returned to the White House a third time to perform for President Clinton in 1995.
Career
When she signed with the GRP label, digital technology was becoming available and she had veteran producer Dave Grusin supervising her first three albums; the recordings also benefited from the cachet brought by Stan Getz performing on them. Her first album under this label, Deedles, met with moderate but significant success, reaching number 35 on the Billboard jazz charts. It was her first record to be released internationally. Following this, Schuur Thing was released in 1985, featuring guest artist José Feliciano, and reached number 10 on the Billboard jazz charts . In that same year, a big break came for Schuur when she was invited to perform on the 28th Annual Grammy Awards Show, broadcast on the CBS Network. Timeless was her fourth album, for which she received her first Grammy Award, winning best female jazz vocal performance for 1986. Four noted arrangers contributed in writing the charts for this recording – Billy May, Johnny Mandel, Jeremy Lubbock and Patrick Williams. The following year she won her second Grammy for best jazz vocal, this time for Diane Schuur & the Count Basie Orchestra. The album was one of her most successful, remaining at the top of Billboards Traditional Jazz Charts for 33 weeks. The Basie Band on the album was led by Frank Foster. Foster himself won a Grammy for his work on this same recording – best arrangement accompanying a vocal, Jazz category, 1987. The session included Freddie Green, Basie's long time guitarist. Then 76 years old, Green's guitar work on the recording was the final performance of his career. In 1985, while on tour in the Far East, Schuur met B.B. King when they both played at a music festival in Tokyo. Schuur and King hit it off musically, and later made an album together called Heart to Heart. Released in May 1994, Heart to Heart entered the Billboard Jazz Charts at number one.
In 1988, she received a phone call from Frank Sinatra asking her to sing with him in a benefit concert in Palm Springs, filling in for Liza Minnelli, who was unable to perform. Schuur was a guest at the Sinatras' home, then performed in a concert with him conducted by Quincy Jones. Sinatra gave her an abstract oil painting he had created. Years later, after his death, Schuur made an album called I Remember You: Love to Stan and Frank, an homage to her then late friends Sinatra and Stan Getz. Schuur continued making albums through the 1990s and into the 2000s, sometimes experimenting with essences of other genres. Schuur Fire (2005) featured Caribbean Jazz Project musicians, with Brazilian guitarist Oscar Castro-Neves. Talkin' 'Bout You – an album titled after the Ray Charles song of the same name, was in the pop category. Jazz purists were not happy with her crossing lines into other genres, saying she was on the periphery of jazz; nevertheless, her pop music still received Grammy nominations – just in a different category.