MUSIC 35

Grief and Jazz

A year after her twin died in a car crash, Claire Maue releases an album honoring her life

Written by STEVE LEFTRIDGE

Hana Maue was almost home. She had just finished her Monday night shift at Target in Fenton and was heading south on Highway 21 to Hillsboro, where she lived with her parents and identical twin sister, Claire Maue.

About five miles from the Hillsboro exit, Hana was struck headon by a 16-year-old drunk driver going the wrong way in the southbound lanes. Hana was transported to a hospital where she died several hours later. She was only 19 years old.

Hana’s death left her twin sister alone on an uncanny date: 2/22/22.

In the aftermath of the tragedy, the grief of losing Hana threatened to overwhelm Maue. She had to deal with it the only way she knew how — through her music.

“After Hana passed away, writing music was a really good channel,” Maue says. “It was a way for me to express my emotions.”

A year later, she’s carrying on for herself and for Hana through the Claire Maue Quartet, which features her father, Shane Maue, on guitar; Funky Butt Brass Band’s Ron Sikes on drums; and local jazz hero Bob DeBoo on bass.

The quartet is set to release an album, Gemini, fueled from the grief of Hana’s loss. The band will perform the songs from Gemini live on Wednesday, March 8, at Jazz St. Louis to mark the album’s release and to pay tribute to Hana’s life.

Long before this album, Maue loved music. Years earlier, she’d started taking saxophone lessons as a middle schooler from Joel Vanderheyden, director of jazz at Jefferson College in Hillsboro, who immediately knew that his new student was special.

“She was already playing extremely well,” Vanderheyden remembers. “You could just tell that she was much more advanced on the instrument than her age would indicate.”

Maue combined her talent with hard work and a single-minded focus; for her, it was all jazz all the time. “I went through a phase in middle school where I would refuse to listen to anything but jazz, which really annoyed my friends,” Maue says with a laugh.

At Hillsboro High School, she continued to impress as a saxophone wunderkind, making Jazz St. Louis’s JazzU All-Stars, gigging around town and joining Jefferson College’s official jazz ensemble while she was still in high school.

After graduating from high school in 2020, Maue and Hana both enrolled at Jefferson College, where their parents had studied music years before. While Maue entered the jazz program to study under Vanderheyden, Hana focused on visual arts — she was an avid painter, photographer and dressmaker. At the time of her death, Hana was in her last semester at JeffCo, with plans to pursue a career in fashion design.

At JeffCo, Maue continued her steep trajectory on the saxophone. “Her sound is one of the most mature sounds I have ever heard,” Vanderheyden says. “The tone, the air support, the concepts — she already sounds like a pro.”

According to Vanderheyden, much of Maue’s musical mastery comes from her strength as a listener. “Claire listens to music all the time — she absorbs it, internalizes it,” he says. “As a person, she would rather listen than talk. She is humble and quiet and just plays her butt off.”

Her approach is working: Maue was recently named lead saxophonist for the Missouri All-Collegiate Jazz Ensemble, receiving the top recognition for tenor sax players among all colleges in Missouri.

Just over a year ago, Maue took another musical step. “Joel [Vanderheyden] encouraged me to start composing my own songs,” she says. “So I started writing music a little bit before Hana died.”

For her first song, Maue worked out chord progressions on the piano and then wrote saxophone melodies as her dad adapted the chords for guitar. Does that mean that she gave her dad a writing credit? “No,” she says, laughing. That writing process proved to be vitally important in the aftermath of Hana’s death. “When the accident with Hana happened, I was trying to think what would be good for Claire to help direct her energy in a positive way and cope with it,” Vanderheyden says. He helped Maue move through the grieving process by encouraging her to write.

She threw herself into composing new songs. One of the songs is a ballad called “Little Flower,” written specifically for Hana. “It’s not supposed to be a really sad ballad,” Maue says. “I was trying to show her beauty. And Hana’s name means ‘flower.’”

Eventually, Maue had enough material for a whole album of original songs. Last October, she gathered a combo and cut the album live in the studio in a single afternoon. Renowned jazz drummer Adam Nussbaum dropped by and appears on the opening track, “Lavender Moon.”

“Claire was just a total pro,” Vanderheyden says. “I’m sure she was nervous, but she didn’t let it show. She had a clear plan of attack. She would say, ‘This is how we’re doing it — here’s the intro, you’re soloing first and then I’ll solo.’ It was pretty incredible.”

The collection covers a spectrum of jazz styles from bossa nova to Afro-Cuban, up-tempo bebop to straight-ahead swing, jazz waltzes to funk charts. Maue titled the album Gemini, after the sisters’ twinaffiliated astrological sign.

“Hana was really an outgoing and positive person,” Vanderheyden says. “And a lot of her life was about helping and giving to other people.”

That spirit lives on in Maue. Gemini announces the arrival of an exciting new talent in St. Louis jazz, but for her the project is primarily an extension of the gifts that her sister brought to everyone around her.

“The music reflects Hana’s beauty,” Maue says. “She just had a really bright outlook on everything. She saw so much beauty in the world.”

Catch the Claire Maue Quartet at 7:30 p.m. on Wednesday, March 8, at Jazz St. Louis (3536 Washington Avenue, 314-571-6000, jazzstl. org). Tickets are $17 to $22.