Taking Her Own Sweet Time

By JAY COCKS

Jazz life on dream street: days of drizzly twilight, long spiky nights of taking a nick off Nirvana with a piano run or a horn solo, walking arm in arm into a rainy dawn with your next sad love affair. Meanwhile, real life on ! Lawrence Street: a two-story frame house in a working-class neighborhood of Washington. The den extension and the enlarged kitchen were not built by the man of the house, Shep Deering, but by his wife, who is handy with a hammer and saw. Her husband of 35 years still works as a mechanic for the Metropolitan Transit Authority. But, says Mrs. Deering, "I'd never marry a musician. I've seen so many bad marriages with musicians."

Mrs. Shep Deering has a night job herself -- as a musician. She plays a fine jazz piano and sings a supernal jazz ballad. People like Miles Davis, Wynton and Branford Marsalis and Toots Thielemans play along with her. She also has a brand-new album that is hovering near the top of the Billboard jazz chart. You Won't Forget Me is the title. It may also be read as an unconditional guarantee: Shirley Horn is indelible.

"It's been written that Shirley Horn is back on the scene," Horn reflects. "Well, I haven't been anywhere. And I've been busy." All that busyness hasn't got her the kind of wide attention she deserves, until this moment. She's had a career for some 40 of her 55 years, but recognition, while often fervid, has been . . . well, say, finely focused. Sales on three of her albums in the early '80s were so slender that a persistent record company still bills her for production costs. If You Won't Forget Me keeps on sailing, she may actually see her first royalty check after about 30 years of recordmaking. "My secret is out of the closet now," she laughs.

More precisely, Horn is front and center, but her secret -- her jazz essence -- is still intact. It's what draws you first when you hear the smoky timber of her voice, the leisured elegance of her phrasing. And it's what holds you, wondering about the magic she brings to tunes as varied as Don't Let the Sun Catch You Crying and You Won't Forget Me. Says jazz critic Martin Williams: "She's not only good and tasteful, but she also has that wonderful sense of drama that can turn any little song into a three-minute one-act play." Horn concedes, "Well, I'm a good actress. I've never had a lot of pain."

Having seen at least three friends fall to drugs, she's stayed clear of anything much stronger than the Drambuie she favors, usually with a beer chaser. She's spent most of her life playing around the Washington area, where she was reared; she was doing a set in Baltimore just two weeks after her daughter Rainy was born in 1962. "I was commuting, having a good time," she remembers. But she had "a young baby, a home to keep, a husband to cook meals for. Then when Rainy was about 11, 12 years old, I felt she needed me. And I guess I needed her. So I slowed down a little."

After that decade lull, she jumped into overdrive. Recently returned from a sold-out debut in Paris, she will gig for a month in California this spring and will play Carnegie Hall for the first time on June 25. But she still understands need: all kinds of need, from longing to desperation, with all the melancholy shadings in between. Maybe that's the secret of her music. Not only the musical dexterity but the heart that's always open and eager to share. "It's just the way I feel about a song," she says. "They call me the slowest singer in the world, but I don't talk fast either. You're trying to tell a story, to paint a picture." And that's just fine. Right now, and for a long time coming, Horn can not only take her time but also make it.

With reporting by Janice C. Simpson/New York