‘JUST GETTING STARTED’
New career for SF jazz singer
Don’t be surprised if, amid a concert tonight filled with jazzy love songs, Barbara Bentree inserts what she calls her “nasty woman” section. You might hear her sing “Everybody Knows” by Leonard Cohen (“Everybody knows the good guys lost/Everybody knows the fight was fixed/
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich/ That’s how it goes/Everybody knows” ).
Or maybe “What You Don’t Know About Women” from the musical “City of Angels” (“But we can see right through you/And ev’ry hollow compliment and phrase defines/And underlines/What you don’t know about women” ).
“I am taking Meryl Streep’s suggestion to take my broken heart and turn it into art,” Bentree explained in a recent interview about plans for her 7 p.m. concert at the Museum Hill Café, part of a regular series of jazz concerts offered there by the Santa Fe Music Collective.
The broken heart Bentree refers to is her disappointment of not seeing a woman finally become president and of seeing the country moving in a direction contrary to her values.
“I feel powerless. It’s my way just to cope,” she said of translating her feelings into her art.
And she is learning how to do that in increasingly diverse ways.
She has long combined a singing career — based in Los Angeles for two decades before moving to Santa Fe in 2005 — with teaching music to children, including working as a music producer with the Mickey Mouse Club in auditioning and working with the Mouseketeers.
But recently, together with husband and jazz pianist John Rangel, she has formed Jindojazz, a company that creates “musician-made films.” She describes that approach as “more compositional.”
And the documentary topics also may be music-related. She and Rangel were in Los Angeles earlier this month pitching their film on Dave Grusin, a musician and composer who divides his time between Montana and Santa Fe. Grusin has scored a plethora of films both for the big screen and television, winning on Oscar for Best Original Score for “The Milagro Beanfield War” (1998), seven Grammies for Best Musical Arrangement and one for the musical score for “The Fabulous Baker Boys” (1989), along with a host of nominations. He also has recorded jazz albums as a performer, conductor/arranger and producer.
But the company’s first film is “My Choice,” produced and directed by Bentree, which was screened this fall before a class at Santa Fe Community College and is slated to be shown Feb. 25 at Center Stage, 505 Camino de los Marquez, followed by a panel discussion.
That film focuses on women who have chosen not to have children, why they
have made that choice and how their lives have unfolded without them. And most of their reasons had nothing to do with “not finding the right guy,” Bentree said.
Despite the fact that she loves children and has spent a lot of time teaching them, she said, “I knew from the time I was 8 years old that I was not going to have children. It didn’t interest me. I never played with dolls.”
Bentree said her goal with the film is “about encouraging young women in particular — and men — to be more conscious about their choice if they’re going to have children.”
With a bombardment of media images that seem to imply that a woman cannot have a complete life without children, Bentree said she had felt somewhat unusual in her choice. She wants women not to feel guilty or afraid if they make the same choice. “I think it has to be a really strong, conscious choice that they embrace fully,” she said of having children. “This is an opportunity to take a look at that and talk about it.”
This film likely would do best as an educational film, rather than ride the film festival circuit, she said. “Hopefully, I can take it on the road to other colleges,” she said.
Documentaries are what she wants to concentrate on, she said, noting, “They can be lifechanging for society ... . Politically, they can be very powerful.”
And, she added, they “can be a very healthy outlet for my strong opinions.”
Women and their choices, and their need to be heard on an equal basis with men in all forums is one of Bentree’s passions. The other two are animal rights and environmental protection.
She has written a children’s book related to animals, she said, as well as a musical screenplay about the environment. “I would love to have it made in New Mexico,” she said. “It’s based on the Native American medicine wheel.”
And, well, all she needs is a few million dollars — or more — to make that happen. But she is encouraged by the out-of-the-blue success of “La La Land,” which recently won seven Golden Globe awards and is well-positioned to have similar success with the Oscars.
Maybe it’s a sign, she said, that movie musicals will have a renewal in popularity.
In any case, Bentree said, while many of her school friends these days are talking about retirement, she’s headed for a new model of aging and “basically starting a new career.”
“I took some big leaps last year,” she said. “It was one of the best years of my life. It’s just getting better ... .
“In some ways, I feel I’m just getting started,” she added. “It’s exciting to me to learn new things. I’m a pretty curious person.”