MARGIE BAKER, JAZZ SINGER, A SAN FRANCISCO DOCTORATE IN EDUCATION FROM UNIVERSITY OF SAN FRANCISCO Some people call Margie Baker EdD ’83 a jazz singer, some a blues singer. “Other people label me, says the celebrated jazz vocalist, “But I just consider myself a singer of songs.” Known for her phrasing and interpretation and for giving a song warmth and personality, Baker has incredible stories to tell from her 41-year career: how jazz legend Dizzy Gillespie became her good friend and mentor, how she was discovered by chance the first time she sang in public, and what it was like growing up in the epicenter of the American jazz scene, just blocks from USF. But Baker’s relationship with music is complicated. She loves to sing yet has no formal training and can’t read music. She’s traveled the world performing with the Monterey Jazz Festival but hates show business and doesn’t like the sound of her own voice. “Music was never my priority,” says Baker, who values two things above all else: her faith, which always comes first, and teaching, which is her life’s calling. For Margie Baker, singing is a side note. When you meet Baker, it’s striking how much younger she looks than her 81 years. For half her life, she’s been singing professionally, but she owes her career to luck and coincidence. Or, as Baker says, the Lord’s will. She was a 39-year-old administrator with the San Francisco public schools, armed with a doctorate in education from USF, when she went to eat one night at Henri’s Room at the Top in the San Francisco Hilton (now the Cityscape). A friend of hers, guitarist George Hanapen, was playing. “I was eating my dinner, and all of a sudden I heard him make an announcement that there was a lady in the house who could sing,” Baker remembers. She looked around the dining room to see who he was talking about. “He was talking about me! He saw me, and he knew I could sing a little because we used to have fun at parties. I got really upset with him for doing that.” Reluctantly, she sang I Left My Heart in San Francisco and returned quickly to her table, where her food was growing cold. “That’s when Mr. Hilton heard me sing,” Baker says, referring to hotel magnate Conrad Hilton, who was also eating at Henri’s that night. Hilton sent some hotel executives to her table with a question: “Ma’am, we loved your singing, and Mr. Hilton loved your singing, and Mr. Hilton asks if you would like to work for him?” “Now, that’s the Lord!” Baker says, “Why would I even be going out on a night like that?” Rarely had she sang in public before, except at funerals or with a hymnal in her hand, but suddenly she was crooning at Henri’s five nights a week during the summer, and on Sunday and Monday nights the rest of the year. Sometimes, during big events, the company would fly her to Las Vegas to sing at the Hilton there. Henri Lewin, the restaurant’s namesake and a top Hilton executive, said Baker had a “tremendous talent for making people happy.” He called her voice a gift and said her many fans included stars like Elvis Presley. “All said it was a ‘must’ to come to San Francisco and sing along with Margie Baker,” he gushed. “She was not only Margie, she was magic too.” THE MOVE WEST Baker was born in East Texas near the Louisiana border in 1933. She lived in a house with no running water or electricity, in “the sticks” she says. The area was poverty stricken and also “very, very racially negative toward African Americans. You know that, you know the history,” she says. Baker explains that her mother didnt want her raised in that environment. She moved them to San Francisco, to the Fillmore District, soon after the U.S. entered World War II. Baker isn’t sure if they moved in 1941 or 1942, but she has a clear memory of the apartment they lived in. “We lived in a cold-water flat during the war. A lot of people were migrating through San Francisco, and these flats had six or seven rooms, one kitchen, and one bath. So we had to share the kitchen and bath with quite a few of people. In the 1940s, a large number of African Americans migrated to the Bay Area, mostly from the South, to work in shipyards and other war industries. Between 1940 and 1950, the number of African Americans living in San Francisco increased from just under 5,000 to more than 43,000, according to the U.S. Census. The Bakers didnt live in the cold-water flat for long, because Margie’s mother landed a solid job that paid well. “She was one of the ‘Rosie the Riveters,’” Baker says proudly. “She was a riveter in Hunters Point and Oakland too, at the Oakland Army Base.” “In those days, the money was flowing because it was war time, and my mother saved enough money to buy a home at 1515 Golden Gate Avenue. That was where I was raised. I think that house must have cost $5,000 dollars in those days.” Baker grew up within walking distance of USF, which was only ten blocks away. She enrolled at the university almost 40 years later. TWO THINGS Baker adored her mother, a devout Christian, and church is where Baker was introduced to music. “I love gospel, that was my first music,” Baker says. “I would sing, you know, Amazing Grace. It’s just automatic. You don’t have to read music, just know the lyrics. That’s all.” She had plenty of time to practice: both of her grandfathers were ministers, one Baptist and one Methodist.“My folks were salt-of-the-earth, poor, African American religious people,” Baker says. “They told me two things: ‘First thing you got to do is trust in the Lord, and you got to get your education.’” Baker did both, and then devoted 51 years of her life to educating others. She started at Patrick Henry Elementary School on Potrero Hill as a teacher and then spent two decades as an administrator with the San Francisco public schools. When she grew tired of school administration and the politics, she asked to work with students again and was named dean of students at Marina Middle School. There, she thrived and postponed retirement until she was 68. “That’s how much I loved those kids. Because so many of them are so needy, they just need people who want to take them and save them,” she says. margie_sfusd Baker introduces her students to Dizzy Gillespie, 1976. MEETING DIZZY When Baker and her mother first moved to the Fillmore in the early ’40s, they lived in the jazz district. Baker was only 8 or 9 years old, but she remembers. “Oh yes, it was hopping!” she says. “I couldn’t go to any of the night clubs or anything, but I was [roller] skating up and down the streets on the side walk on Fillmore Street, and Billie Holiday was playing over there, and Nat King Cole was playing over there. I didn’t know too much about them, but I liked the music. And that’s kind of how I got into music, as a kid in the Fillmore District. Because Fillmore was a jazz-club haven. “There was a little nightclub on Turk and Hyde, it was called the Black Hawk. College students could go on Sunday afternoons. If you were under 21, you had to sit behind the chicken wire, because you couldn’t sit where they sold liquor.” That’s where Baker met John Birks “Dizzy” Gillespie, one of the giants of American jazz and a multi-talented trumpeter, composer, bandleader, and occasional singer. “Well, one Sunday afternoon after we studied, we decided we were going to go down to the Black Hawk. And when Mr. Gillespie saw this group of college students, he was very impressed with that.” Baker was 17 and already a sophomore at UC Berkeley, on scholarship. “Oh that blew his mind,” Baker says. “From that day on Mr. Gillespie and I were dear friends until the day he died.” But 20 years into their friendship, Gillespie had no idea Baker could sing. She decided to invite him to Henris to watch her perform, and he showed up with a friend in tow, Jimmy Lyons, who founded the prestigious Monterey Jazz Festival. “So, Dizzy came up there to hear me sing for the first time, and Mr. Lyons heard me sing, and the next thing I knew, Mr. Lyons was asking me to travel around the world with the Monterey Jazz Festival.” Baker said yes, a decision that would take her talent to the world stage. “I would go to Japan for a month, come home, the next year I might go to Russia, come home. The next year New Zealand and Australia. I traveled every summer with the Monterey Jazz Festival for seven years.” margie_hilton San Francisco Hilton, Circa 1975 Gillespie and Baker performed together often. If Baker were in the audience (which she often was), he’d invite her onstage to sing, and not just in New York and L.A. “When I was performing in Tokyo, he was there too at the Blue Note,” Baker recalls. And so they performed together across the world. Despite the many times she sang with a living legend, the story Baker tells most eagerly about Gillespie involves an audience of San Francisco school kids in 1976. “We booked him in some of the elementary and middle schools, and he performed for those children. It was just a wonderful occasion. Just wonderful.” Even as Bakers singing career took off, with singing engagements worldwide, she kept her job with the school district and booked performances only if they didnt interfere with her job in education. FULL CIRCLE In the summer of 2014, Baker released her fourth album, Margie Baker Sings With So Many Stars. She enjoys a standing gig at the Hyatt Regency in Burlingame, where she adds the jazz to its lavish Sunday brunch. The audience hears a lot more than jazz, however. Baker has a long list of favorite songs, in many genres, and sings whatever strikes her mood. She loves If I Cant Have You by Alicia Keys, Caught Up in the Rapture by Anita Baker, The Thrill is Gone by B.B. King, Be My Love by Mario Lanza, and the 1930s blues tune Since I Fell for You. “I also love good country,” she continues, “and I sing Patsy Cline’s Crazy all the time. From Broadway, one I really love is Somewhere from West Side Story, and Nat King Cole’s Unforgettable, I love singing that. Above all, I love my religious gospel music, and one of my favorites is Aretha Franklins Oh Happy Day.” One of her all-time favorite vocalists is Barbara Streisand. “Oh, I love that woman,” she says. Baker remembers one student in particular from her first job at Patrick Henry Elementary, and it brings her story full circle. That student is John Santos, and Baker remembers teaching him “reading, writing, and arithmetic.” Today, Santos is a five-time Grammy-nominated musician and a recognized expert in Afro-Latin music. Hes also a featured percussionist on Baker’s new album. margie2014Baker, 2014 When asked what makes her successful, Baker replies: “There are two factors in my success, as far as I’m concerned. Because I am a devout believer in my religion and in education.” “Music has never been my priority. I wasn’t even thinking about singing until I was 40 years old. Number one, I am interested in saving my soul, that’s the top priority. Secondly, all the other stuff.” (USF)
Posted on: Fri, 16 Jan 2015 18:54:28 +0000
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