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'To sing a song is to tell a story'
Latin-jazz singer explores her own traditions in Sephardic songs

by Janet Silver Ghent

Five years ago, Kat Parra was invited to audition for Cirque du Soleil — not the "contortion thing," she jokes, but as a Latin-jazz singer. Not long before that, she had ended a gig with Bay Area salsa band Charanga 9 and thought she was "pretty much" finished singing.

In anticipation, Parra began dieting and exercising, and getting her voice into shape, expecting the audition to take place shortly.

"But nothing happened," she said. "So I went on with my life and started teaching music to children in elementary school," in addition to working at Cisco Systems as a graphics designer.

Two years later, with just a month to prepare, she finally got the call to try out in Los Angeles. She didn't get the gig, but the experience changed her life. She met singers who earned a living at their craft — without day jobs.

"That really opened my eyes to the possibility of having a career as a vocalist," said Parra, who had worked for years in "corporate America" and was a single mother of two sons. "I had to feed my children. Music was my moonlighting job."

Reflecting on that fateful audition, Parra said: "I got my voice back. ... I will always be grateful to Cirque du Soleil for bringing me back to music."

At 46, Parra has achieved her dream of becoming a full-time musician. She's released two CDs, quit her day job and taken her eclectic mix of Latin-jazz-world music from the Bay Area to Brazil to Mexico.

Most recently, with a grant from the Zellerbach Family Foundation, Parra is exploring a tradition of her own: Ladino music, the songs of Jews who left Spain after the Inquisition. She and other musicians from her project The Sephardic Music Experience will perform on Thursday, Nov. 13, at Palo Alto's Cubberley Community Theatre.

The concert is part of the Silicon Valley Jewish Film Festival; the performance will follow a screening of the documentary "Ladino: 500 Years Young." The film centers on Israeli singer Yasmin Levy, who tours and performs songs in Ladino.

With her sons pursuing their own artistic dreams, Parra had the time to focus full attention on her own. Patrick Parra, 26, is a singer-songwriter and hip-hop artist who performed in the opening song of her first CD, "Birds in Flight." Danilo, nearly 24, is a pianist and cinematographer, who also composes. Kat Parra recently rented out her house in San Jose, a city in which she spent most of her life, and moved to Oakland to be nearer to the venues where she performs.

Growing up in a musical family, Parra knew her life would be in music. Her father, the late Lawrence Okun, was an accomplished musician as well as an obstetrician-gynecologist. Her mother, Barbara Rose, a marriage and family therapist, encouraged the children's gifts.

Parra, the second of three children, began singing at 5. At 6, she disrupted her older sister's choral solo at San Jose's Temple Emanu-El, not only singing along but singing louder.

"I've always just loved to sing," she said. "If I found a melody I could attach to, I wanted to sing it out."

In high school, she formed a guitar folk duo, and played piano, guitar and flute. But during a yearlong stay in Chile at age 15, through the Youth for Understanding program, she was matched up with a musical family and began to explore the music of the region, including the folk traditions of the Andes as well as Latin jazz. Soon she was singing at festivals and competing for prizes.

She also met the man she would marry and became engaged at 16, marrying two years later. But after a year studying classical flute at the University of California at Los Angeles and taking voice lessons, she was "pretty miserable" at UCLA and hated Southern California, so she and her husband moved back to San Jose. Patrick was born when she was 20, Danilo two-and-a-half years later.

The marriage ended after five years, and Parra enrolled at San Jose State University as a voice major, deciding to focus on jazz. Her mentor, Patti Cathcart of the music duo Tuck & Patti, encouraged her to find her own voice and stop emulating other artists such as Joni Mitchell. Parra, who says "in my younger days I was considered a coloratura soprano," learned to sing longer, straight tones, without vibrato. And while she uses her entire vocal range, she favors the mellower tones of her lower register, soaring to high notes for improvisation and embellishment.

Her CDs, which also include "Azucar de Amor (Love Sugar)," feature songs with mambo, salsa and samba beats, among others, sung in Spanish, English and Ladino. With arrangements by musical director Murray Low and hybrid rhythms from Afro-Peruvian to Middle Eastern, she moves old standards into uncharted territory.

At a performance last weekend at Redwood City's Little Fox Theatre, Parra gave Duke Ellington's classic "Caravan" a new spin, opening with exotic Middle Eastern chanting and then segueing into Spanish lyrics and scat singing.

Arrangements of Ladino songs she and The Sephardic Music Experience perform also incorporate a variety of traditions. "Seta Montana D'Enfrente (This Mountain in Front)," a mystic love ballad, opens with acoustic bass and mournful Middle Eastern tones, giving way to a Latin jazz tempo. "Kuando el Rey Nimrod (When the King Nimrod)," perhaps the best-known Ladino song, about the birth of the baby Abraham, features strong percussion, lending an up-tempo world music texture to the traditional ballad. "Por La Tu Puerta (I Passed by Your Door)" mixes modern jazz with Mediterranean and Brazilian strains.

Also in the works is an album of Sephardic music. "All the Sephardic songs I've chosen embrace the basic theme of love," Parra said. "Unrequited love, loss of love, a longing for the one true love, love of country, love of the alcohol raki."

Parra, who describes herself as a secular Jew who feels "very tied to my Jewishness," comes from a background that's 75 percent Ashkenazi (Eastern European) and 25 percent Sephardic.

She began researching the Sephardic tradition and bought a couple of CDs while visiting Spain. "I realized it was something I could sing in," Parra said. "I could understand the language and was drawn to the music."

She also learned that Muslims and Jews who came out of Spain had a shared language and traditions. "I wanted in my own little way to recreate that and bring people of all walks of life together to perform the music."

Parra found it easy to make the leap to Ladino. The Romance language is similar to Spanish, in which she is fluent, but with some of the softer sounds of Portuguese, as well as words from Hebrew and Arabic.

"I need to be able to sing in a language (in which) I know what I'm singing, and I need to be able to sing authentically," Parra said.

"If I can't sing in a language that is part of me, I tend to stay away from it. I'm kind of a snob in that way. If I hear people sing in a language, and they haven't spent the time to learn the proper pronunciation, it drives me crazy.

"To sing a song," she added, "is to tell a story and to bring the world into that story. If I can't sing with conviction, it's not worth singing that song."

What: Vocalist Kat Parra and other musicians from The Sephardic Music Experience project perform at the Silicon Valley Jewish Film Festival. The concert follows the showing of the documentary film "Ladino: 500 Years Young," about the songs of the Sephardic Jews.

Where: Cubberley Community Theatre, 4000 Middlefield Road, Palo Alto

When: The 52-minute film begins at 7 p.m.; the concert will follow.

Cost: Tickets are $10.50 general, $9 for seniors and students.

Info: For more information about the film festival, go to svjff.org or call 408-833-9226.

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