If you are a singer looking to get discovered these days, you would probably head to a karaoke club, try out for one of those televised singing competitions or make a TikTok. April Varner who makes her Cleveland debut at BOP STOP Sunday, took a different path.
“My family would hear me singing in the bathtub when I was like four or five years old, I had memorized the songs from the movies particularly ‘The Little Mermaid’ because, you know, I look kind of like her with the red hair.”
The early flashes of talent were no fluke as Varner’s win at the International Ella Fitzgerald Jazz Vocal Competition demonstrated. But while singing was always in Varner’s future, jazz most definitely was not. Headed for an operatic career, the young singer made a sudden about face during her freshman year at Indiana University. Yet the decision wasn’t easy.
“I had hated jazz,” she said on a video call from her New York apartment. “There was no concrete reason. I thought it was super boring.”
She was a member of IU’s Singing Hoosiers show choir when the director unexpectedly placed the jazz-averse Varner in the Vocal Jazz Ensemble. “[He] said, ‘You have a great voice for jazz. This is what you should be doing. I remember laughing in his face, but as time went on, I decided to let my guard down a little bit and explore more of this music. And I really loved the freedom of it versus classical music.”
Varner’s debut full-length recording, April (Cellar Live, 2024), confirms the wisdom of her choice. Through the album’s 11 selections, all with April in their titles, Varner’s understanding of jazz phrasing is remarkable for someone so young (she turned 27 in, you guessed it, April).
Varner has a light, agile voice and great time, that make comparisons to Fitzgerald inevitable, and Varner readily acknowledges the peerless Ella as a major influence. But on a recommendation by vocalist Sachal Vasandani, her teacher at IU, Varner undertook a deep dive into the emotionally rich artistry of Carmen McRae. “I feel like a lot of singers and a lot of musicians don’t credit her as much as they should,” Varner said.
The recording’s clever organizing principal was a happy accident. “At first I had just thrown at [producer Ulysses Owens, Jr.] a million standards that I loved,” Varner said. “And it was just a mess. Like, it wasn’t any like concrete theme or anything. So then we came to my name, which we thought would be cool. We got on Zoom and put in my name in a Spotify and just saw what came up.”
Of course, there was “April in Paris” and the inevitable “I’ll Remember April.” On the recording Varner sails through the latter, a playful and largely improvised duet with trumpeter and vocalist Benny Benack III that seems inspired by the classic Fitzgerald/Louis Armstrong recordings made by Norman Granz in the 1950s. Prince’s wistful “Sometimes It Snows In April” is affectingly done and the almost bedroom-poppy “April Come She Will,” a deep cut from the Paul Simon catalog, demonstrate Varner’s stylistic range.
I was tempted to choose between the Theo Bleckmann-produced “Dear April” or Varner’s very slow, very heartbreaking reading of the old Nat King Cole ballad “Lost April” as the best thing on the record. Then the final “Who Let April Back Into My Dreams?” arrived. It’s another ballad, a classic AABA structure with an honest-to-G*d verse. It’s the kind of thing that could have been written in 1947, but it’s a Varner original. “I’m a sucker for a really depressing ballad,” Varner said with a laugh.
Is there an April shower of original compositions on a hard drive somewhere? Varner waves off the notion. “Songwriting has not ever come easy to me,” she said, adding “Unless you’re like someone like Taylor Swift, I feel like it doesn’t come easy to most people.” Yet for all Varner’s easy fluency with the jazz language, the freedom that she found there has her looking over the musical horizon. “I love singing every kind of music,” she said. “Being from the Midwest, I love country music and love singing that style. I love singing folk music. I love exploring different sides of my voice in that way.”
April Varner, with pianist Caelan Cardello, Jordan McBride on bass and drummer Gabe Jones, Sun., Aug. 25, 7 p.m., BOP STOP, 2920 Detroit Rd., Cleveland, Tickets $ 15 available here
NOTE: This article was written by a real human being. No artificial intelligence or generative language models were used in its creation.
Red beans and ricely yours,
jc
