At first JazzArtSigns, which comes to Wheelock Family Theatre March 9, sounds like a bad joke: jazz for the deaf. Even after American Sign Language interpreters have become standard not only at political conventions but at shows by Dave Matthews and Bruce Springsteen, even after deaf percussionist Evelyn Glennie has become a concert-world sensation, even after decades of legislation intended to help level the playing field for the disabled. Even after all that, could a deaf person really feel included in a jazz concert?
Years ago, jazz singer Lisa Thorson arrived at the answer you’d expect: not really. Holly Near and Ronnie Gilbert have a long history of working with sign-language interpreters, but they’re story-song troubadours. Thorson often sings wordlessly, or scats, and the metaphors of a standard like “My Funny Valentine” aren’t particularly accessible through sign language. When she was first approached by concert presenters about working with ASL interpreters, she was game, but the audience wasn’t.
“We first tried it in a Boston Globe Jazz Festival performance in the ’80s,” she tells me in her office at Berklee, where she teaches voice. “It was an experiment, and we asked the deaf audience, ‘What do you think?’ The people who were totally deaf, where ASL is their primary language, said, ‘Not happy.’ ”
Thorson, who has been in a wheelchair since a 1979 spinal-cord injury and is known for her political activism, began turning down shows that offered ASL interpreters. “It put me in the horrible position of saying, ‘Oh yeah, I’ll do the gig, but I don’t want a sign-language interpreter.’ How ridiculous is that? Me, a wheelchair user, saying, ‘Nope! Sorry!’ ” She laughs. “Talk about a not politically correct thing to do!”
But in 1998, the service group VSA Arts of Massachusetts approached her with a proposal. “They said, ‘If we come up with some money, will you try to create a jazz concert that uses universal design principles and that would be accessible to a broader audience?’” In addition to her band — saxophonist Cercie Miller, pianist Doug Johnson, bassist Dave Clark, drummer George Schuller — Thorson hooked up with her friend and colleague Jody Steiner, whose long experience using ASL in her art ranges from her work back with the National Theater for the Deaf up through gigs with Springsteen and even Bill Clinton. And Thorson called the artist Nancy Ostrovsky, who for years has painted canvases as accompaniment to live jazz.
Other components of JazzArtSigns include supertitles and an audio describer (for blind audience members). At Thorson’s Web site (www.lisathorson.com) you can stream video snippets of past performances and see how Steiner and Ostrovksy augment the performance with dance-like movement. Multimedia means you get a number of ways into the performance. But most striking is the audience dynamic that the show creates. Thorson explains that at one show a woman who’d brought her deaf septuagenarian father said, “This is the first concert that we’ve gone to together where we’ve both had equal footing in the experience.” That complete audience experience is key to the show’s appeal.
