Jazz great remains true to her state

Add Diane Schuur to the list of great jazz singers from Washington state – right up there with Bing Crosby and Mildred Bailey.

She’ll make a return foray into the hometown of those two singers on Saturday, in a concert with the 17-piece Spokane Jazz Orchestra, under the direction of Dan Keberle. She previously appeared with the SJO in its 2004 season opener.

Schuur lives in California now, but her roots are firmly in this state. She was born in Tacoma and raised in Auburn. Her father was an Auburn police captain and a piano player, her mother a jazz aficionado.

She grew up listening to her mother’s jazz records: Doris Day, Ella Fitzgerald and most influential of all, Dinah Washington. Because Schuur was blind, music was especially vivid to her. She had perfect pitch and was able to teach herself to play the piano.

“Deedles,” as Schuur was known as a child, learned to sing Dinah Washington’s “What a Difference a Day Makes” when she was little more than a toddler. She then had years of formal piano training at the Washington State School for the Blind. Her first public performance: the Holiday Inn in Tacoma at age 10.

She began working as a jazz singer all over the Northwest right after she graduated from high school. When she was first discovered by the rest of the jazz world in the late 1970s and early 1980s, she was living in an apartment in Renton.

Schuur went on to win two Grammys in 1986 and 1987 and had No. 1 records on the jazz and contemporary jazz charts. Her albums still routinely make it into the Top 10 on the the Billboard jazz charts.

Now, she has returned to her roots with her most recent album, “Some Other Time,” recorded with an acoustic combo.

“This is a new launch for my career, letting people know that I’m in this beautiful art form that we know as jazz,” Schuur told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer earlier this year.

“I’m ensconced in the jazz idiom and this is where I belong. I’ve been flirting with pop and stuff and that’s good because I can do it, but this is coming back to the basics of what I grew up with and what I want to do in my career.”

The album is a celebration of the music her parents loved, especially her mother, who died when Schuur was young. It contains familiar songs from the ’50s and earlier, including “Nice Work If You Can Get It,” “They Say It’s Wonderful” and “Taking a Chance on Love.”

“After enough time goes by, everything your parents ever told you, everything they ever tried to teach you, starts to make sense,” said Schuur in a press release.

You might hear some of those tunes in Saturday’s concert, along with selections from her many other influences along the way, especially Count Basie, Sarah Vaughan and especially Dinah Washington.