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Vocalist  Rita Graham is a sensitive and attentive singer of quality songs. She sings with a natural ease that's at once effortless and commanding. She doesn't posture or pose. She doesn't oversell her performance, allowing the songs -- and not her delivery of them -- to bask triumphantly in the moment. Graham was born in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia but grew up in Detroit, where her father ran a barber shop/beauty parlor that featured a rather unforgettable jukebox. "People would come from all over the city to my dad's barbershop," Graham recalls. "That jukebox had everything you could think of on it. "Meanwhile, her mother, a jazz pianist raised on classical music, also exposed young Rita to a wide variety of performers and styles. Little could Graham have known the path to which her parents' influence would lead. She's performed with Ray Charles, Harry James, Kenny Burrell, Oscar Peterson and many others. Along the way, she's also crossed paths with Redd Foxx, Mike Post and Howard Hughes, to name a few. It's a course Graham has followed intuitively. "People ask me how I do all these things. I tell them that I don't do anything," Graham says. "I do what that voice in my head tells me to do. It's a spiritual thing, like a beacon." By the time she moved from Detroit to California in her late teens, Graham knew that music, and not an impending career as a schoolteacher, was her destiny. Gigs in Los Angeles led to an Australian tour, where she met Ray Charles backstage in Sydney. "Ray and I started singing, and I knew all those [songs] that he started throwing at me," Graham recalls, with a laugh. Back in L.A., the tour behind her, her mother soon had a phone message for her: Ray Charles was interested in putting out an album by Graham. "She said, 'You'd better sit down,' ... I almost fainted," Graham says. The LP, Vibrations, was released on Charles' Tangerine label in 1968. Shortly after she'd finished the record, Graham got another call from Charles. His vocalists, the Raylettes, walked out on him the day of a show. "He called and said, 'What are you doing today?' ... He said, 'Come on down here. I need a little help today.' ... That night, we were standing onstage at the Coconut Grove." Graham worked with Charles for a year before moving on. In 1974, she landed the role of Coretta Scott King in the musical production, Selma. She reprised the role off-Broadway in 1983. Also in 1974, comedian Redd Foxx, one of the show's financial backers, brought Graham to Atlanta to perform scenes from the play at a Southern Christian Leadership Conference event. The visit sowed the seeds for Graham's eventual move to Atlanta. In the late '80s, Graham worked in an L.A.-based ensemble with saxophonist Steve Hooks (who performed on and helped produce her Sambuca CD). By 1990, though, she was ready for a change of scenery for her family, which included two daughters and a granddaughter. She remembered her Atlanta visit and soon the entire family, including her husband and mother, relocated here. Graham performed at the now-defunct Sounds of Buckhead restaurant, and later was a featured vocalist in the African-American Philharmonic Orchestra. She began her Sambuca stint in May 1999, working usually with keyboardist Jez Graham (no relation), bassist Gary Land and drummer Mike Nepote, although on this night, Arthur Turner is on piano. "I see life as a series of moments," Graham says. "All we have is that moment, and I try to create lovely moments that people can enjoy." |