The Howard County
I N
F O C U S
VOL.2, NO.6
F O R
P E O P L E
OV E R
5 0 JUNE 2012
More than 30,000 readers throughout Howard County
Deanna Bogart and all that jazz
I N S I D E …
PHOTO ©MICHAEL G. STEWART
By Robert Friedman Deanna Bogart has often had to battle her way into playing music the way she wanted in a genre dominated by men. As a middle school student, she yearned to wail on the saxophone like Charlie Parker and Ben Webster. Instead, she was handed a clarinet and told, “This is what girls play.” “I was 11 years old and I knew that wasn’t right,” Bogart said. “But I couldn’t say why.” What she could do is prove them all so wrong, building a successful career as a jazz and blues pianist, vocalist, songwriter, band leader and, yes, award-winning saxophonist who has played with such luminaries as Ray Charles and BB King.
FREE
L E I S U R E & T R AV E L
Day trips back to early American history; plus, credit cards that stretch your travel dollar
A promising beginning Born in Detroit and raised in Queens, N.Y. and Phoenix, Ariz., Bogart’s musical voyage began just a few years after birth, when she was “climbing on any available piano bench to plunk and play with preternatural panache,” as her website puts it. Such panache apparently was too unorthodox for the Brooklyn Conservatory of Music which, she said, “gently removed” her from the school because she insisted on playing piano by ear rather than learning to read those stodgy written notes. None of it stopped her from deciding to make music her career. Bogart moved to Howard County in her early 20s to join the western swing band called Cowboy Jazz. Four years later, still with the band, she married the road manager, who hailed from an “old Howard County family.” A few years later, she formed her own group, the Deanna Bogart Band. She has been a resident of Howard County since 1981, living for the last eight years in Woodbine. Surprisingly, she didn’t start playing the sax until she was 26 years old. Now 52, she’s a three-time winner of the national Blues Music Award’s Horn Instrumentalist of the Year Award (2008, 2009 and 2010) for her saxophone playing. She has also won 22 Wammies — the music awards given by the Washington Area Music Association for “significant career achievements.” Bogart brings down house after house
page 23
ARTS & STYLE
Nationally renowned jazz and blues musician Deanna Bogart, who lives in Woodbine, will give a concert at Howard County’s WomenFest on June 16. Bogart, one of the country’s leading saxophone players, also plays piano, sings, and writes many of her own songs.
wherever she and her eponymous band play, whether in area music clubs, festivals around the country, for U.S. troops in Iraq and Kuwait, on rhythm-and-blues cruises to the Caribbean, or at the Great Pyramids in Egypt, as she did during a “Blues on the Nile” tour. DownBeat, a leading jazz and blues magazine, has called her “an extravagant entertainer.” She has also been described as a female Jerry Lee Lewis, which Bogart says is fine, even though she owns no Jerry Lee recordings and feels her piano playing is more from the old Kansas City swing jazz
and boogie woogie school. Her keyboard influences, she said, start with Kansas City great Jay McShann and move on to boogie woogie innovator Pete Johnson, modern jazz masters Thelonius Monk and Dave Brubeck, and classical phenom Glenn Gould. Her style is to combine the blues, boogie woogie, rock, country and jazz as she works out on the piano, wails on the tenor sax, and sings her soulful songs. She calls her blending and bending of the musical genres “bluesion.” See DEANNA BOGART, page 28
Why are public sculptures sprouting across Howard County? Plus, singer Melanie finds a brand new audience page 26
FITNESS & HEALTH 4 k A way to predict heart attacks? k Don’t overdose on vitamins THE SENIOR CONNECTION 16 k Howard County Office on Aging Newsletter LAW & MONEY 18 k Reliable investment advice k The risks of Treasury bonds PLUS CROSSWORD, BEACON BITS, CLASSIFIEDS & MORE