Who would guess soprano and songwriter Tiffany Austin, most recently seen and heard in the Vallejo Symphony’s April semi-staged production of Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess,” graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, Law School?
Would she voir dire witnesses with a smooth vocal line? Would she object by scatting “Relevance, your honor?” or “Foundation?”
Her law degree is only one aspect of a considerable biography for the Berkeley-based chanteuse, but it is certainly an anomaly in the jazz vocalist business in which she has gained an increasing amount of attention in the last decade. She did, after all, release her debut album, “Nothing But Soul,” in 2015, followed by “Unbroken” in 2018, the latter a reflection of Black American culture’s resilience, both getting favorable reviews, and has performed in famed New York City jazz venues and the Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles.
In the coming days, Austin will continue to lay aside the law and pursue her self-confessed passion for The Great American Songbook with a May 24 benefit concert for the Vallejo Symphony, “George Gerwhin and Others,” at Vallejo Naval & Historical Museum in downtown Vallejo.
Just how did she end up on concert stages instead of in a California courtroom is “the big question” she often gets, she said during a Sunday telephone interview.
Born and raised in South Los Angeles, Austin has loved music since her childhood. Her older brother, John Austin IV, is a rapper and she grew up, she said, “Watching someone pursue music and have a career. My brother modeled that for me.”
Yet she admitted insecurity “about being an artist” as her life’s work, noting that her mother and aunt attended law school, with their telling her it was easy. The logic and intellectual exercise of the law “are baked into” her family’s history, said Austin, adding, “It was kind of a given that I’d go there.”
“When I went to law school, I enjoyed the intellectual rigor,” she said. “I wasn’t told that, culturally, it’s a pressure cooker.”
She applied for law school while living and working in Tokyo, where she made a living singing for nearly six years. She was accepted and earned a scholarship to Boalt Hall.
And after graduating, she came to the conclusion that “in a legal atmosphere there’s a competitiveness you don’t encounter in the music business.”
Austin said she studied music independently while attending law school and, upon graduation, “recalibrated,” asking herself what she was “poised to do for the rest of my life.”
“The answer for me was to live a very soulful life,” she added.
To her, living the soulful life means “being connected to my calling and being connected to other people.”
“That’s what is invigorating and enlivening for me,” said Austin, who is single. “Even though I enjoyed the intellectual stimulation and excitement of law, I realized the most connected I felt was doing music.”
She was unsure what her Gershwin selections, accompanied on piano by Adam Shulman, would be for the pending concert, but she mentioned “Summertime,” “I Loves You, Porgy,” and “Our Love Is Here to Stay,” the latter song from the film “The Gershwin Follies”.
However, Austin hinted that her program may include “They Can’t Take That Away From Me” and ” ‘S Wonderful,” and so many other Gershwin tunes, written by lyricist brother Ira, made famous and helped to form the core of the 20th-century classic jazz vocal repertoire.
The Great American Songbook, enduring standards played and sung over and over down through the generations, includes, besides the Gershwin catalog, songs by Cole Porter, Harold Arlen, Irving Berlin, Hoagy Carmichael, Richard Rodgers, and Jerome Kern, to name some of its best-known contributors.
But Gershwin, the son of Jewish immigrants from Russia and a school dropout who liked to wander uptown and visit Harlem jazz clubs, did it all as a composer — concertos, orchestral works, opera, musical theater, 318 songs, piano and film and chamber music. Although a prolific songwriter, he remains best known for the 1935 “Porgy and Bess” opera.
Austin may render the Gershwin tunes in unexpected ways, since, she said, adding, “I like to reimagine standards. That’s just another part of the adventure.”
She grew up in a house filled with music, tunes by Donny Hathaway and Stevie Wonder, with her Louisiana Creole grandmother introducing her to jazz, a development that led Austin to understand what “soul” was about.
Particularly vexing for her, she said, was a trend by some to “separate Black music from Black people,” that its foundation are spirituals, field hollers, and ragtime, which evolved into the blues, which formed one of the several elements of jazz.
To separate blues from jazz is especially maddening to Austin, saying, “When you intellectualize jazz, it’s sometimes thought as if Black people had nothing to do with it. It’s like saying, ‘I’m not related to my mother.’ ”
She added, “In my own education, blues shouts feed into what we call jazz. There’s a through line.”
And it includes Gershwin, whose genius needed no more than the four-minute frame of popular song, with its predictable verse and chorus structure.
IF YOU GO
- What: “George Gerwhin and Others,” a fundraiser for the Vallejo Symphony, featuring soprano Tiffany Austin, with pianist Adam Shulman
- When: 7 p.m. May 24
- Where: Vallejo Naval & Historical Museum, 734 Marin St.
- Tickets: $125
- Online: www.vallejosymphony.org
- Phone: (707) 643-4441
