- Dayna Kurtz
- The Rockzillaworld Interview
- By Marianne Ebertowski
 The first thing I see when
the door of the car opens, is a pair of long black-trousered
legs sporting a set of impressively sized walking shoes wriggling
their way into the open air. Dayna Kurtz is a lot taller than
I expected her to be. She has a firm handshake, a big friendly
smile, an unruly mass of dark-brown hair, serious jetlag and
a craving for French bread and paté. Bad luck. That's
the sort of stuff people around here prefer to eat in the winter.
Today it's almost 90 degrees, unusually hot for our part of the
world, even at this time of the year. We find a small restaurant
where we can sit in the garden. Unfortunately, we're being showered
with rather terrible French and Belgian pop music dripping from
a plastic speaker above our heads. Not quite the right setting
for an interview, but the food's okay.
Dayna was born on the Jersey shore, on commuter distance from
New York. Her parents were middle class, first generation out
of Brooklyn, grandchildren of Jewish immigrants from Eastern
Europe, Poland and Russia, mostly. "They're still together,"
she announces proudly.
" I had a nice family, but it was very dull. I didn't like
it very much where I grew up. It was one of these postwar development
sites with five kinds of houses for five square miles. Everything
was highly conformist and weird kids didn't do very well. So
I used to escape to the city a lot. Like most descendents of
fairly recent immigrants, my family did a lot to stamp out their
heritage to put in America, my parents in particular. Though
my father had a love of Russian composers and I always liked
their melodramatic tendencies. But apart from that, like every
kid or grandchild of an immigrant, you have a certain desire
to figure out where you're from, because you're not ashamed of
it like they were. You want to figure out what's behind all
those stories and the accents and the way grandma drinks hot
tea - with a sugar cube between her teeth - which is great for
your teeth. (laughs) In that search I was drawn towards Russian
music and cantors. There were quite a few famous Russian and
German Jewish cantors around. I was raised an atheist, but I
found records from the 1920's cantors that were famous in Europe.
There was one in particular who influenced Caruso. People used
to come to the service just because his voice was so beautiful.
And you can hear the roots of American Broadway music in the
way they're singing. You can hear it when you listen to Rogers&Hammerstein.
My parents and my grandmother were all really into musical standards
and my grandmother's sister used to play movie houses. They
spent a lot of time with the Jewish theater. I certainly like
to trace the roots of music and figure out where that comes from.
American jazz, the standards, the lexicon of songs, is actually
a mixture of Afro-American culture and Jewish."
Dayna started singing and playing really young. She taught
herself how to play the piano, made up little songs and then
"got wrecked by lessons."
"When I was three or four I used to imitate Beatles songs,
I played the melody and accompanied it with my left hand. And
my parents thought, 'O my god, she's a prodigy' and sent me off
to this classical teacher who hit my knuckles with a pencil when
my fingers weren't in the right position. That scarred me so
much I still can't play piano to this day. Fortunately, my eight
years older sister had asked for a guitar and never played it.
So I bought a few books and taught myself how to play and had
the good sense of not to get lessons (laughs)."
Kurtz is the most proficient female slide player I've seen
and heard this side of Rory Block. She needed no lessons to
get the hang of that she learend from watching.
"I wrote songs with slide in it before I knew how to
play slide. That's a good way to learn because I don't like practicing.
(laughs) I've done gigs with guys who played slide and I just
loved the sound of it. It's such a human mournful sound. I don't
like playing lead very much, but I like the idea of using guitar
playing for a 'color.' So I just watched players like Gove
Scrivener an unfortunately rather unknown southern player
and I toured with Kelly Joe Phelps. They both gave me
some pointers. I was really drawn to the fact that Phelps didn't
need the slide to sound pretty: he uses this really unattractive
extra noise. If you play slide, you get all these overtones so
people damp the strings behind it to get the pure tone, but he
uses all the overtones and screeching noises - he's like Hendrix
or something. He taught me a lot about exploring the sonic possibilities
of slide. Chris Whitley taught me a lot as well. "
Before she started writing her own material, Dayna already
made money with making music. As a teenager she played bar gigs
at Jersey shore doing James Taylor songs and Janice Joplin songs
for drunks and tourists. Her first tour came about purely accidental.
"I played a women's music festival and I wasn't even
booked to play. Some friends of mine were going there to work
in the kitchen. It was in Georgia and I had never been in the
South before, except South Florida, which is really Brooklyn
with palm trees (laughs). I went to play my first showcase for
promoters in a workers' coffeehouse. After that I thought, I
could do this, as a matter of fact, this is all I want to do.
I set up my first tour from there and started writing my own
stuff from that point onwards."
In 1996 Dayna became female songwriter of the year of the
National Academy of Songwriters, something that didn't exactly
make her career, but, nevertheless, may have opened the door
to a few gigs. While she was in negotiations with a small publishing
company, she did a gig at the Bluebird in Nashville, where she
met Bug Music Senior vice-president Garry Velletri. He was actually
there to see the act after her, but he immediately proposed to
work with her and was pretty sure he could get her a record deal
pretty soon. Unfortunately, that never happened. Deals either
never came Dayna's way or they fell apart at the last minute.
Postcards from Downtown Dayna Kurtz made on her own,
without a record company backing her up. Kismet, the label her
album was released on in the USA, is a family affair.
"Kismet is just a dream project of the man I went to
marry, Jeff Pachman. We were dating at the time. Jeff
had worked in the music industry for a couple of decades, since
he was a kid. He's done a lot of jobs. He ran Rockville Records,
he signed Uncle Tupelo to their first record deal, he signed
Blue Mountain. He worked at Bug. I had lost my deal with Jive
Records, Britney Spears record label, which was supporting me,
and it was all a go till the marketing guy said: I have no idea
how to get this to radio. For me, that was it. I decided to never
ever talk to one of these major labels again. It had been too
heartbreaking too many times and such bull: when people start
to talk to you about singles, you go 'singles'? You gotta be
kidding! (laughs) So Jeff said, let's do it. We did and we're
actually looking to license other artists. "
The deal with European label Munich came along really fast.
Dayna and Jeff contacted a few European labels and heard back
from them right away. "It just felt right," Dayna
beams. "Everything was falling into place really quickly
(snips her fingers). European record deals are so sane prepared
to American record deals. I got a two-page deal! Even with a
small record label in America you get a contract this thick (laughs).
You have to hire lawyers to grapple over it forever and in the
end you basically have a slave deal. It's Machiavellian!
It was such a fair deal and they seemed just such good people
with their hearts in the right places."
Postcards from Downtown is Dayna's first studio album
after quite a long period of songwriting. She hardly ever plays
her old material anymore, though people who have seen her earlier
or have purchased one of her live tapes, keep requesting it.
"It's a little like reading an old diary from when you
were a teenager," explains Dayna, "even though I wasn't
a teenager anymore - as a writer I felt like one. You see exactly
where you're full of shit; you see where you're trying too hard
being something that you're not. I can see where I was trying
too hard to be Joni Mitchell Hejira phase. Trying
too hard is a part of every writer's life and that's fine. I
wrote one song when I was about 25. It's on my life album
and it's called "Touchstone." I knew immediately
that I might get tired of this song, but I'd never be ashamed
of it. Pretty much every song I wrote after that point was worthwhile
keeping, but I feel like I really couldn't find my voice before
that."
The jazz, blues and Eastern European influences on Dayna's
album are pretty obvious, but her songs also share the rare quality
of great sixties songs like Peggy Lee's "Is That All There
Is" or Shirley Bassey's "Send In The Clowns,"
songs that have something "theatrical."
"It came out on this album a lot more than I expected,"
Dayna admits, "up unto that point I pretty much played
and toured solo. So I kind of had visions of what it would feel
like with a band. It was surely a surprise for me. My teenage
fascination with Broadway musicals was coming out. That was a
part of myself I thought I had buried when I found Joni Mitchell
and Tom Waits and left that long behind. So I found out I was
a real drama queen. I just really tried to make a record that
didn't sound like a singer/songwriter record, like there's a
singer/songwriter singing these songs and the rest is this tasteful
backing up. I wanted it to be big, then I wanted it bigger and
then I wanted kettledrums on like 'boom boom boom
boom' - it felt wimpy without it. I think I was drawing on some
sort of drug from the past..."(laughs)
Dayna doesn't sing, she "plays" her voice like Bird
or other jazz musicians play(ed) their horns. How did she develop
her range, her way of using her voice like nobody else quite
does at the moment?
"I always had a pretty big range. I made it wider. I
went to places that weren't comfortable to me, because it was
interesting. My biggest influences vocally were jazz singers.
I listened to a lot of Nina Simone - and people who were influenced
by jazz singers like Rickie Lee Jones. I like using my voice
as an instrument. It's my primary instrument. I barely consider
myself a guitarist. I' have become proficient at what I do to
support what I'm doing lyrically and vocally. But I always feel
that it's lagging behind. I'm a natural vocalist - the guitarists
I know, they noodle all day. They can't wait to get back to their
guitar and when they see a guitar player do something they don't
know how to do, they go back and make themselves practice and
learn it. If I see someone do something on a guitar I can't,
I just go 'wow,' that's good, I can't do that (laughs), unless
it serves something I'm doing, or it moves me so deeply that
I feel drawn to it. But if I hear a vocalist doing something
I can't do, like that dog whistle stuff that Mariah Carey does,
I wanna know how they do it, I wanna know what my voice can do.
Your voice changes constantly, when you're on a plane, when you
have a cold, when it's dry, when you just had chocolate milk.
Your voice forces you to be where you are sometimes. It feels
like you have a different voice every day and that's really fascinating
to me."
On Postcards Kurtz uses rather intricate arrangements
that put down every instrument and every note in exactly the
right place.
"My band consists of really fine and sensitive musicians.
I tell them exactly what the vibe I'm going for is. It's collaborative;
it's an atmosphere that I'm looking for. When I'm writing I
know what I want the song to feel like. I sort of get that sense
and until I get there I'm throwing shit against the wall and
see what sticks (laughs). That's pretty much how the album was
made entirely."
When I see Dayna perform a couple of months later, she has
two of her musicians with her: drummer Randy Crafton and upright
bass player Dave Richards who has also been playing for Nina
Nastasia. Randy co-produced and engineered Postcards.
He comes from the world music community, and is originally a
percussionist and a mambo player.
"It's a fascinating experience working with him, because
his notion of time is so flexible," explains Dayna and adds,
"and mine is as well. I just speed up and slow down within
a song and it doesn't freak him out. He's used to play with Indian
ragga's and Turkish music, so he speeds up and slows down because
that's what music does. Nothing about music really should be
metronomic. Though, when I got more into R&B, I started
demanding from him to hold down the four timewise and he did
and that's a nice feeling, being kind of blues and being flexible
timewise as well."
Then there's Ethel, the string quartet. Dayna is, understandably,
very sweet about them, after all they played at her recent wedding.
"They played a string quartet version of 'Foxy Lady' when
I walked down the aisle," she says with a big smile, "that
was very cool! I love playing with them. They are doing extremely
well in the neoclassical world in New York right now, playing
really big halls."
Dayna Kurtz' songs are more than the sum of lyrics and music.
They work like a movie and its soundtrack. Her approach to songwriting
seems to be organic as if music and lyrics come at the same time.
" I write very cinematically: I see the song before I
can even hear it. When I was writing "Paterson," I
knew exactly what I wanted it to feel and look like. I just
had to figure out what I meant by that. It was just a sort of
waiting on what that meant, leave myself open to that, flopping
around, researching the neigborhood, listening to Italian street
music. I have this ball of images in my head and sometimes it's
supported by lyrics and melodies or just one line. In the case
of "Paterson" it was (sings) "all the way down"
(laughs). If it makes my heart pound I know, okay, something's
going on here and eventually I figure out what I'm writing about
halfway through the song. Yes, I work like a sculptor. I take
bits away and get to what I'm trying to say. It's a complex
way of writing."
Can she invent characters of a song that have not necessarily
anything to do with her?
"Well, even when I think that I'm writing about another
character like in "Just like Jack," it winds up being
about me. Of course, they're fictionalized versions of what
actually happened...People are usually pretty shocked how generally
well adjusted and happy I am (laughs). The part of me that I'm
writing about is the part that exists in everybody. It's the
part that has angst and falls apart and gets hurt and longs for
connection and feels guilty and horrible. It's not that I'm living
that all the time."
Talking about angst and tortured artists, there's Dayna's
song "Somebody Leave a Light On," clearly referring
to Jeff Buckley.
"Jeff once came to a show of mine. Grace was one
of the last truly great albums I ever bought. He came along just
when I thought I had exhausted everyone and I was just desperate
for something that moved me. It knocked me on my ass; I couldn't
remember the last time I was that obsessed with a record. I could
feel he was really on to something so real and deep. The fact
that he was in the audience terrified me, and I'm not easily
terrified in front of an audience (laughs). I couldn't even believe
he was there. I could barely speak, I was so self-conscious.
He seemed to like it, I don't know. That was the only time
I ever saw him, but I know a lot of people in New York who knew
him. He left behind a world full of crushed musicians, probably
even more so than Kurt Cobain. Kurt Cobain's death affected his
fans. I don't think Kurt Cobain was that much of a musical influence
as Jeff Buckley was. Jeff Buckley was a musician's musician
- I could hear his influence everywhere from Coldplay to Radiohead
(laughs). It's just amazing having such a seminal influence
with just one record out. That was a huge loss."
Postcard is full of tortured songs. At the moment,
Dayna Kurtz is happy. Two years ago, she met Mr. Right and
a few months ago she married him. Are we looking forward towards
an album full of happy love songs? Can she write happy songs,
an impossible task for most singer/songwriters?
"It's quite difficult. Very few people have done it
well. The deepest happy music comes from New Orleans for me.
But then, what the hell is happy? Stevie Wonder wrote fabulous
happy songs. Blues makes people happy because they can dance
and drink and make love to it and it's the blues! I did have
people tell me that they make love to my music all the time,
so I gotta believe that it's tapping into something beyond happy
or sad because otherwise, why bother? Before I met my husband
I was literally on my way to move to New Orleans. I'm very influenced
by a place and I had felt like that New York metropolitan area
had worn itself out for me creative-wise and I really was ready
to be influenced by New Orleans and ready to integrate that sort
of not shallow joy into my music."
Maybe that will happen one day. I certainly wish Dayna will
stay as happy as she is right now for the rest of her life.
After all, there's always other people's misery to write and/or
sing about. And that's exactly why Dayna Kurtz' next album will
consist of mainly cover songs. One of them will be Duke Wellington's
"I've Got It Bad." And, believe me, Dayna can sing
and play the shit out of this song - I've seen her do it on stage
and you could have heard a pin drop among the audience. What's
even better - on her new CD it will be a duet with Norah Jones.
When reviewing Dayna's Postcards for Rockzillaworld
I expressed the hope that it would win all the Grammy's Norah
Jones' Come Away With Me had won last time. Maybe there
will be a Grammy to share between the both of them next year.
www.daynakurtz.com
Contact Marianne Ebertowski at ebertowski-at-rockzilla.net
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