Jan Peters Makes You Care
/The Boston Herald
I never liked the song “When Sunny Gets Blue.” Back in the old days of long playing records, I would get up from wherever I was sprawled - I was a teenager and teenagers sprawl - and lift the record player’s arm and skip right over Johnny Mathis moaning, “Her eyes get gray and cloudy,” and place the needle on the next song.
Who cared about Sunny?
Jan Peters has made me care.
Jan Peters was named the “Best Cabaret Performer of the Year” by Boston’s Bay Windows 2002 Cabaret Year in Review but unless you subscribe to this publication or have wandered into the Encore Lounge at the Tremont Hotel late on a Friday night, you’ve probably never heard of her.
I hadn’t until a year ago when my daughter insisted that I would not fall over dead if I stayed up past nine on a Friday night. “You have to listen to this woman sing. You will love her,” she said. And I did. I had heard the phrase “making a song your own,” so many times but I’d never quite understood it.
And then I heard her.
When she came out with a CD a few months ago I bought it. It’s her voice, an 18-piece orchestra and old songs. How could I go wrong?
You can’t find this CD on Amazon.com or in any of the big music stores because she’s not a big name and she doesn’t have a public relations firm. But she has a web page, www.janpeters.com. And if you go there you can hear her sing “Ask Me Again,” and “I’m Glad There is You,” not in their entirety and not “When Sunny Gets Blue.” But you hear enough to get you wanting more.
I have to confess, I have a fondness for old songs, the kind where you can understand the words - and say them out loud in front of small children. Where the words have meaning and the beauty of the music doesn’t come from fancy piano playing or an orchestra swelling, but from the smooth voice of a singer in love with her song.
That was Rosemary Clooney’s magic and it’s Jan Peters, too. “If you don’t believe what you’re singing, no one is going to believe it,” she says. She’s 43 now but she’s been in love with the music since she was a kid growing up in a house in Brookline where music was as available as air. “My dad had an extensive collection. I listened to Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra and Jack Jones. I think that’s how I learned to sing. I used to open my bedroom window when I sang. I had a childhood fantasy that someone would hear me and whisk me away.”
The reality is better. When people hear Peters, she whisks THEM away.
She never pursued a career as a singer. In high school she sang in the chorus and in the choir. “I had the dream and I knew I could sing. But after high school I didn’t know where to go.”
One night when she was 25, she and a friend wandered into Walters, a Brookline, Massachusetts restaurant. “There was a piano bar and people were singing and I thought, I want to do that. So I went home and practiced for a couple of weeks. Then I went back. The first song I sang was, ‘Where or When.’ I was nervous. I was scared.” But when she finished singing people wanted more.
She sang at piano bars for years. This was her school of performing arts. “It was a great way to learn, great exposure to different piano players.” She met people, learned what worked and what didn’t, made contacts and pretty soon people were hiring her.
Then came the gig at Boston’s Encore where she performed for years. And the gig at Boston’s Club Cafe’s Napoleon Room where she currently performs.
The music Peters sings is ageless: Gershwin, Jimmy Van Heusen, Rodgers and Hart. And it takes you somewhere new every time you hear it. “I like to honor the beauty of the songs. No acrobats,” she says. She sings songs the way they were written.
