RENEE DORUYTER:
DISCOVERY WAITING TO BE MADE

By Lyndon Grove

On one wall of Renee Doruyter's apartment in Vancouver's West End (which, although dense with highrise buildings, manages to remain funky) is a framed pencil sketch of the singer signed "Benedetto." "Tony Bennett was here for a concert," says Doruyter, whose day job is editing copy for The Province, one of the city's two daily newspapers. She was then writing music reviews and interviewed Bennett by telephone. At the end of their conversation, he said, "Well, I'll see you backstage after the concert." "Uh, I'm afraid not," said an embarrassed Doruyter. "I can't be there. I've got a gig." "Well, then," said Bennett, "I'll come hear you." "'Sure,' I thought," says Doruyter. "But he showed up after the concert, along with a couple of his musicians. He brought me a rose and after I finished my set, gave me this sketch."

Renee Doruyter is probably Canada's best unknown jazz singer -- a discovery waiting to be made. She has recorded three albums: Every Time We Say Goodbye, Hooked on Romance and From the Heart. Her favorite, not surprisingly, is the most recent, From the Heart. But the first is the most inventive and the second the most riskily personal. In Everytime We Say Goodbye, with arrangements by pianist Lorne Kellett, she takes "It Might As Well Be Spring" at hummingbird speed; "Nevertheless" becomes a fast waltz; "What is This Thing Called Love?" is edgy, drivingly insistent. In Hooked on Romance, she sings poems of her own, set to music co-written with Miles Black and Rick Kilburn. This is the verse to the title song:

I've read the books, I can talk the talk
Most of the time, I can walk the walk
I've quizzed my spirit guides
Astrology, psychology, mythology, Scientology
Have all had their way with me

The runes are great, I Ching's divine
Meditation takes too much time
My inner child and I
Are still trying to be friends

My psychic tells me
I just need to make amends -
you know it never ends
Read my Tarot cards each week
to take a peek
at what's ahead

What do I hope to see?
Someone to cherish me
What do I find instead?
That love's a mystery
I still sigh for the guy who's too shy to ask me to dance
After all this time, I'm still hooked on romance.

The song has a spare sophistication in lyrics and melody; it could become a quiet classic in the Alec Wilder mode. "This is a hard record for people," Doruyter says. "It's about the dark side of romance -- being hooked, like addiction." The poet/singer is asked: "Have you ever been seriously hooked on romance?" With a half-smile, she says, "I haven't had a lot of luck in that area."

Renee Doruyter was born in Rotterdam, where she made her first stage performance at age five. Then her family moved to Canada and lived "in the bush" in British Columbia's Cariboo region.

"I always sang," says Doruyter. At 11, she sang the Peggy Lee hit "Fever" in a talent show, accompanied only by drums and fingersnaps. When she was 13, she heard Ella Fitzgerald's live performance album Ella in Berlin and discovered jazz. After that, "I listened to everybody -- Ella, Billie Holiday, Anita O'Day, Carmen McRae, Sarah Vaughen, Ethel Ennis." Curiously, she paid little attention to the once modestly famous Dutch jazz singer Rita Reyes, the only person whom -- on her debut CD -- she even slightly resembles.

Doruyter worked in radio for years and has always been in demand for voiceovers. Her enunciation and articulation are impeccable and there is no trace of an accent -- except that hint on Everytime We Say Goodbye. For some, this is one of its charms but, after that recording, it vanished.

The teenage Doruyter enrolled in what was then the Vancouver School of Art ("I still carry my sketchbook to clubs with me"), then UBC, where she studied theatre. She worked at coffee houses, waitressing, drawing, singing when she could. "I'd get up on the stand and then the band would throw me some curves and I'd be sent back to the kitchen."

Dropping out of school, she got a job in a radio station "doing women's news, voiceovers, writing commercials. I even got talked into entering the Miss Kamloops contest." Singing "Summertime" and "The Girl From Ipanema," she won the talent award. Soon she had a job singing weekends at a club called Andy's Hideaway, wearing peekaboo glow-in-the-dark dresses made by her mother.

She moved to Toronto, sang there for a while, then got a job at the Skyline Hotel in Ottawa ("where I first bleached my hair blond"). She is still a pale Champagne blond, although she claims to have had red hair for years and, for a time, "an Angela Davis afro."

Back in Toronto, she worked as a production assistant on the CBC news show Radio Free Friday, precursor to As It Happens. Being a production assistant meant "keeping track of tapes and time zones, running for coffee, giving back massages to hosts Maggie Morris and Peter Gzowski." At night, she was singing at the Waverley Hotel at College and Spadina in the Silver Dollar Room, along with "topless dancers and a stripper. The boss liked me because I didn't smoke dope in the dressing room and didn't hustle the customers."

After what she describes as a "bad romance" Doruyter returned to British Columbia, clerked in a drugstore, sang in clubs, lived in her brother's attic and took ballet lessons. Then she landed a job with Ben Kopelow's talent agency, sang with a band called Windmill and "started sounding like Janis Joplin."

More radio work and then a crack at writing reviews for The Province. One night she was singing at Hy's Encore when Vancouver Sun columnist Jack Wasserman, then the most powerful writer in town, came in. Doruyter turned to her accompanist and said, "Listen, I know we did 'Lady is a Tramp' 15 minutes ago but let's do it again." It was Wasserman's favorite song. In the next day's paper he wrote "Take it from me -- Renee Doruyter sings a lot better than a lot of people she's sent to review."

Doruyter became her newspaper's all-round arts writer and also its fashion editor. She covered dance, theatre, music. And gave up singing, because she considered it a conflict of interest. But in 1986, in New York on a fashion assignment, she went to a Greenwich Village piano bar with friends, who pushed her up on the stage to sing. "They liked it," she says. And so did she.

Back in Vancouver, having a bad year -- "a relationship that was going sour, my mother dying of cancer, having my own brush with it, I looked in the mirror and asked 'What do you really want to be?'

"I realized I had to sing. It meant ending my relationship. I took lessons, worked hard, went to Hugh Fraser's Jazz Workshop at the Banff School of Arts, studied with Jennifer Scott, Shannon Gunn, Jay Clayton, Sheila Jordan, Rhiannon."

The results are unpredictable and extraordinary. She goes places you wouldn't expect her to go, gliding over the melody, extending phrases or running words together, changing tempi, interpreting lyrics with enormous theatrical intelligence, giving words an intensity they don't usually possess (listen to her insistent "Dear!" in "East of the Sun"), acting sometimes the ingenue, sometimes haunting and teasingly distant, with a European amour-propre.

One singer admires her "perfect pitch," notes a suggestion of Diane Schuur in her power and restraint, and says "she has the warmth of Sarah, the joy of Ella." But Doruyter is really like no other singer you've heard, although you may think if Garbo or Delphine Seyrig had sung, they might have sounded like this.

Renee Doruyter says, "I have to sing. I've tried to walk away from it. But it's when I feel most myself, when I'm most joyous. It's the time I feel complete."