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Diversity can cut both ways. For some it’s a career limiting liability. But for Deanna Bogart who has somehow managed to balance middle age, motherhood and twenty years of uncertainty on the road as a band leader, it’s a performance enhancing asset.
It all flows from what Bogart calls her “fearless chip.” It’s “the stupid stubbornness that says, “I want to try that,” she remarks. Something that manifested itself musically in school when she resolved to play the saxophone instead of the clarinet in fifth grade band, it has coloured her outlook with a philosophical hue. “Nothing hurts creativity like safety”, she states. ”In art, as in life, you can’t have the magic if you’re not willing to risk the train wrecks.”
Bogart’s innate inclination to follow her inquisitive muse has turned her into a marketing guru’s ultimate challenge as she gracefully leaps the genre gaps between blues, two martini jazz, country swing and pop on stage and eight successful recordings. She’s even coined the word “blusion” to describe her idiosyncratic mingling of styles. “At the core of it is the blues,” Bogart says. “It can go in many different directions and cross-pollinate. So for me it’s a fusion. I let it go where it needs to go.”
A self-described “divorce brat” who was born in Detroit in 1960, Bogart has called the Motor City, New York and Phoenix, Arizona home. The two constants in her nomadic upbringing were her grandmother’s 1930 Baldwin baby grand piano and her mother’s eight-track collection. Always the new kid in town, music became a way of making friends for Bogart as she adjusted to four elementary schools and three high schools.
Currently based in Maryland, she began her professional career in 1981 singing three-part harmony and playing piano for six years in the Western swing band Cowboy Jazz followed by two years of touring as a saxophonist in Root Boy Slim’s R&B unit.
Critics and fans grabbed hold of this top-flight entertainer from the moment that she broke out as a solo artist in 1988 and never let go. Cashbox called Bogart a “Butt-kickin” barrelhouse player that could give a good chase to old Jerry Lee,” while The Washington Post summed her up even more effectively with three words, “Lustre, sophistication, soul.”
The winner of more than twenty Washington Area Music Awards, Bogart was named Best Saxophonist at the Blues Music Awards in 2008 and 2009. Her recent stellar work with the Legendary Rhythm & Blues Revue has brought her to the attention of the national audience that she deserves.
Backed by a band that is as tight as a tourniquet, Bogart is justly famous for her live shows where she jump starts the party with rollicking piano boogies and blows a storming, soulful sax. The best of her many original songs are bittersweet ballads. Sung convincingly with her smoky late-night voice, they ponder the misty boundaries between dreams and illusions.
Don’t miss the wholly satisfying “blusionistic” spirit of Deanna Bogart. www.deannabogart.com
Ken Wright
