BAZZLE DAZZLE Germaine Bazzle is the Grand Dame of New Orleans Jazz

Live at Jazz Fest on Friday, April 28 WWOZ Jazz Tent | 2:50-3:50 p.m.

By Dean M. Shapiro

Jazz fans will recognize this catchy phrase and the scat style in which it is sung as a Duke Ellington composition from the early 1930s. It premiered in January 1932 with the Ellington big band accompanying singer Ivie Anderson and, soon afterward, it was made famous by Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong.

Local jazz fans, however, will recognize it as the signature song of the woman known as “The First Lady of New Orleans Jazz,” Germaine Bazzle. Born in 1932, ironically the same year the song was first performed and recorded, Germaine has sung the song hundreds—perhaps even thousands—of times over a very long career.

And whenever she does, as she will very likely do at her upcoming Jazz Fest gig, she will give it her own distinct interpretation, further jazzing up the lyrics and the scat portions and sometimes even mimicking the sounds of horns with her unique vocal dexterity. Her repertoire of other songs that she also performs live appears to be limitless. when city officials proclaimed it “Germaine Bazzle Day.”

Germaine Bazzle will be one of the headliners for opening day of this year’s New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival at the Fair Grounds Race Course on Friday, April 28. She will very likely be the oldest (or one of the oldest) performers among the hundreds scheduled to appear at the seven-day music and cultural event. She has been a regularly scheduled performer at nearly every Jazz Fest since it began in the early 1970s.

At ninety-plus years old and still singing, Germaine, for a brief time, thought she might have been over and done, according to other sources. In an article written by Keith Spera for the Times-Picayune/New Orleans Advocate in April of last year, Bazzle said that the pandemic was forcing her to retire, and she wasn’t envisioning making a comeback.

However, when asked to come up and perform at a Father’s Day event at which an old friend was playing piano, she didn’t hesitate. From that moment until the present, she knew that the word “retirement” was not in her vocabulary.

A long-time educator with over a 50-year teaching career, Bazzle has shared the stage as a featured performer with more luminaries than it is possible to list. A few of them include Lee Dorsey, Charles Brown, Red Tyler, Johnny Adams, Ellis and Wynton Marsalis, Dianne Reeves, and DeeDee Bridgewater. She has recorded two albums of her own in 1996 and 2018 and has been credited as a collaborator on more than a dozen other albums between 1962 and 2016.

Over the past 30 years, Bazzle has reaped multiple honors, including four Big Easy Awards from Gambit for Best Female Performer and two Best of the Beat Awards from OffBeat magazine for Best Contemporary Jazz Vocalist and Best Female Vocalist in 1996 and 1997, respectively. In 2015, Bazzle received OffBeat's prestigious Lifetime Achievement in Music Education Award.

Bazzle was born in New Orleans and grew up in the city’s culturally rich 7th Ward. Coming from a musical family, she began playing the piano by ear at a young age. Her formal musical education began when she was 12 and enrolled at Xavier University’s Junior School of Music. Her earliest musical influences included Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald, and Billy Eckstine.

After graduating from Xavier University of Louisiana, Bazzle worked as a teacher, including many years as choir director and music appreciation instructor at Xavier Prep. She retired from teaching in 2008 but continued her musical career, singing regularly with the Saint Louis Catholic Choir and the New World Ensemble, as well as in nightclubs throughout the city. She is also a supporter and faculty member of the annual Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong Jazz Camp held every summer for aspiring young musicians. Still performing today, she is a frequent headliner with her own backup band at Snug Harbor in the heart of the Frenchmen Street. Even as she turns 91 this month, Bazzle shows no sign of letting up, and the physical energy she emits from the stage is still there in full force. In her interview with Keith Spera prior to last year’s Jazz Fest, Bazzle acknowledged that if she had cut more records and was willing to go on tour, she might have had a lucrative full-time career as a singer. However, touring held no interest for her. She was content to stay at home in her beloved New Orleans, doing what she enjoyed most, teaching and performing locally for her legion of appreciative fans. In an interview with this writer in December 2018, as she was prepping for a Tricentennial tribute to Ellington’s “New Orleans Suite” composition and other New Orleans musical legends at the Jefferson Performing Arts Center, Bazzle was reminded that “You’ve had a very impressive career.”

Her humble and modest response was, “Oh, I don’t know about that. I just get up and go to work. I do this because it’s something I have the opportunity to do. And I love doing it.”

Germaine Bazzle will perform during the first weekend of the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival presented by Shell at 2:50 p.m. on Friday, April 28 in the WWOZ Jazz Tent.