Rita di Ghent

By Alex Teitz and Karen Weis

   Every so often an artist comes along who challenges the “norm” in such a way it can be perceived as a genius or a threat. These artists are found in every genre. Rita di Ghent first caught FEMMUSIC’s attention with The Birth of Sprawl. This 1999 release mixed jazz and urban music into a smooth and troubled picture. It is its own revolution in the jazz scene.

In 2001 di Ghent released The Standard Sessions Volume 1. This album is composed of jazz standards including “What a Little Moonlight Can Do” and “He Beeped When He Should Have Bopped.” FEMMUSIC had an in-depth interview with di Ghent in January for our jazz issue. FEMMUSIC can run it now. For more information visit ritadighent.com

FEMMUSIC: Can you describe your songwriting technique?

RDG: Oh, interesting that you should ask, because I’m just sitting here doing that right now. It’s one of those things where you want to put some thought to it, because if you put thought to it then you can hopefully facilitate the process more and more as you do it. But then there is a certain mystery to it that you don’t want to get into too much because mysteries are wonderful things, and you kind of don’t always want to solve them. So, the real answer is that there isn’t any one approach that I take. It can start from the music, sometimes I’ll just, you know, have a riff in my head and that’ll inspire some lyrics. Sometimes the song is driven by a story, so I’ll just have a story in my head and set the story to music. Sometimes…sometimes the songwriting process is an assignment that I’ll give myself, because I may have never written a song, you know, that has a descending tetrachord, so you know, I’ll sort of give myself that assignment and see what happens. But regardless of the approach that I take, the one thing that I’ve found about myself is that I’m not very good at tinkering and crafting, and I seem to enjoy the process and enjoy doing the broad strokes. But as soon as it starts to get…well, that’s not true, I kind of like tinkering a lot of times, but once I kind of get the overall story or the overall thing happening, if it starts to feel contrived or if it doesn’t want to come, I generally leave it. Once in a blue moon, those things revive themselves, you know, after a year or a couple of years or something like that, but oftentimes if it has trouble being born (laughs) so to speak, that it just doesn’t feel right and I’ll drop it. I depend a lot on inspiration. A LOT. It’s very easy for me to write when I’m inspired and it’s very difficult for me to write when I’m not. (laughs)

FEMMUSIC: (laughs) I understand too well.

RDG: I’m sure you do. (laughs) And I worship anybody that throws any inspiration my way. I absolutely worship them. Like one song that I wrote this year that should be on the next album, the theme for it just came out of a conversation I had with somebody at a jazz club, and we were at the bar. And she’s a very funny person, and she just said this very funny dry thing, and it inspired a song that, you know, I more or less went into obsession mode and wrote in a day, and I LOVE that, so much.

FEMMUSIC: That sounds terrific.

RDG: But not exactly a pat answer, is it?

FEMMUSIC: It’s very rare that I ever hear a pat answer to that question.

RDG: It’d be really interesting just to look at, like a little paragraph synopsis of how, you know, 20 different musicians answer that question. I know that that question tends to get asked a lot and you do see it in interviews, but it would be really nice to just see side by side, you know, little capsulizations of that little overview. It would be fascinating. You know, really thoughtful answers. I try to give thoughtful answers because in this business, there are people who are trying to get inspiration from other people. I know that when I was first starting out, I would go to a lot of clinics and stuff like that, and you know the whole process seemed very mysterious. The whole process of music making and creating things seemed, you know, mysterious to do in any kind of formal way, and so you know, you would ask this question of somebody who you really admired, and they would just go, “Well you know, your horn is like your woman. Treat her right and get results.” And I would go, “Well FUCK THAT!! Thank YOU very much! Now I know who to call.” (laughs)

FEMMUSIC: How did you choose the songs for Standard Sessions?

RDG: Let me think…now that I’ve paved the way for saying that I give thoughtful answers…oh my gosh, how did I choose the songs? You know what, I almost have to look at them…can I grab the CD? Just a sec. (comes back) Well that blows, it seems to be in the other room. I thought I had a copy on my piano. OK, let me think here. OK, so “What A Little Moonlight Can Do” was I think one of the first songs I ever learned, and it’s always, for me, it’s always really fun to sing. It’s the first song I became enamored with. Of course, the first songs I ever became enamored with weren’t jazz songs, they were R&B songs and stuff, but in the jazz genre. So I wanted to do that, and I wanted to do that also because it’s really bright. The tempo’s really, really bright and not a lot of singers tackle those bright tempos and so it’s fun to do, and it’s always a morale booster in the studio when the guys are playing, you know, mushy songs, to pull out something that really challenges them and they say, “I don’t think we should do any more than two choruses, or my calluses will fall off.” (laughs) And you know you’re barking up the right tree. And the drummer just like, grows a foot. So there’s that, and then what else? “Over the Rainbow”…you know, it’s really weird, “Over the Rainbow”, I was just practicing piano, and I pulled that chart out. And I started to sing it, and I realized that it sat good in the published key, and I thought, “This is such a pretty song”. And of course we all grew up with it, anyone who grew up with the movie, and I knew it was cliché, and I knew it belonged to Judy Garland, but I thought, “Damn! You know, I feel like I really…I feel like I’m really connected to this song.” So I did that, because of that. And ummmm, what else….oh, there’s always blues in my music, like big time, so there are a couple three tunes in there that are very blues-based, and they’re “Willow Weep for Me” which I like because overridingly composers in jazz are male and Ann Renelle penned “Willow Weep for Me”. So it’s just such a great tune, and I love the fact that it’s written by a female composer. I do that tune almost every gig I do. So I wanted to document that, and then “I Want A Little Boy” is a blues tune that I always teach to my students, because first I teach them the 12 bar blues, and then I teach them that there are blues with bridges that have longer forms. And oftentimes I get them to sing that song cause it’s fun to sing. And then yeah, I do it with all my students and I thought, “Well geez, I’ve been playing this for my students for so long I should just record it.” And what’s the other blues-based one that I do…oh, “I Want A Little Sugar In My Bowl”. Well, just anything that Nina Simone does is absolutely top of the heap, because every single arrangement she did of every single tune that she’s sung is so quintessential, and she’s a huge inspiration. So there’s that, those three blues tunes. Oh gosh…oh, there’s one original on there, “All Baby Wants Is Me”. I write, I like to write tunes that sound like, not specifically that they sound like that era, it’s just that I like the sound of tunes from that older era, sort of from the 30s to the 50s, because that was an age when the melody seemed like it was everything. And now with a lot of groove-based stuff, which I totally love and totally love to perform, it’s not so much about the melody. So it’s fun and it stretches you when you sit down to write a piece of music and you think about a good melody. Not that “All Baby Wants Is Me” is that great a melody, but it’s a tried and true progression, so it’s based on rhythm changes. Which of course there are gazillions of tunes written over those changes and so most people who are writing in jazz get down to writing a few rhythm change tunes. So that’s why I did that one. And oh sorry, what I started–this is very long winded…I hope you’re recording this and not doing shorthand. (laughs) Oh, well what I started blabbing about, but went off on a tangent–at least 2 tangents-was that I write these kind of old style tunes, and then I don’t get much of an opportunity to play them because I tend to do a lot of more contemporary stuff. And so I try to shove them on other people who do sing those tunes. So I’ve had a couple recorded and stuff like that, but I always try to shove them onto the people who make the bucks. Like, you know, I’ve shoved a couple into Diana Krall’s hands, but you know, I think they got promptly dismissed. And Carol Sloan I gave a couple of my tunes to, because she’d just sound great singing them, I mean it’s her bag. But I don’t get to sing them very much. So one of the beauties of doing the “Standard Sessions” was that I could actually include a couple of originals that are in that older style. Oh, “I Loves You Porgy” was an eleventh hour addition because my mother revealed that it was her favorite song. And I couldn’t believe I went all my life without knowing that was my mother’s favorite song, or that she never revealed it. So she did, and so I put it on there for her. There’s one other ballad….hmm….what’s the other ballad?…(counts songs off)…oh, “You Go To My Head”. That’s another one of those tunes, one of the very first tunes I learned, off a vinyl Billie Holiday record. Off a vinyl Billie Holiday, so it was one of the first six tunes I learned into the ground and so I wanted to document that. I think that’s almost all of them.

FEMMUSIC: What was the best experience making Standard Sessions?

RDG: What a good question. Um…the whole thing was just charmed. I was on Cloud Nine. It was absolutely charmed experience making it. Um…well I’m going to throw this out for now until something takes it place, but I did some of the arrangements and some of the arrangements we spontaneously did, and I know when we got the groove to “All Baby Wants Is Me”, which is the original tune, the boys decided to sort of take a Nina Simone thing and completely reverse it, like do it backwards. And it sounded SO COOL! And the birth of that riff just was absolutely intoxicating. You know, I always want to create…you know how you have those favorite songs, like you hear the first chord in “Let’s Get It On” and you just feel like you could melt and die and you wouldn’t care? I always wish I could do arrangements like that where, you know, someday somebody will just hear the first chord or the first, you know, seconds of the tune, and they’ll know for sure that it’s THAT tune and no other tune. And I sort of feel like the groove or the intro for “All Baby Wants Is Me” is in that category, if even in my own mind. (laughs)

FEMMUSIC: Well, I will fully admit with The Birth of Sprawl that that one captured me the second I heard it.

RDG: Well you know, the Standard Sessions…I’ll be completely honest with you, a lot of the people who went nuts over The Birth of Sprawl are disappointed by the Standard Sessions because they want to hear more stuff like The Birth of Sprawl. And I think that that’s perfectly okay. And then Standard Sessions opened a lot of doors for me because a lot of people like me, like my singing, but when they bought The Birth of Sprawl they kind of went (gasps) ‘Oh, this is RAP!’ or they wouldn’t buy it, and they’re eating up the Standard Sessions. So I think, and you probably feel this way too, as a creative person, we have a lot of sides, and I don’t think we need to feel the pressure to be consistent in any way. I think we can develop all those different facets of our feelings, and the Standard Sessions happens to be songs that I love but not a lot of political content, and you know, I don’t really feel like every outing has to be like that. Although you should hear what I’m doing now! (laughs) It’s going to rock your world! But thank you for those kind words about The Birth of Sprawl. You know how it is when you put something out, you have some doubts, but you have that AFTER you create it, you can’t…I mean you have it while you create it too, but you have to commit to what you’re doing and not think about the product too much in terms of will people like it. I mean, I always tell my students that you can’t be thinking about will people like it. If it comes out of a passionate place then it’s going to be a good thing regardless of how it affects other people. It’s a very, you know, I mean it’s OKAY that some people don’t like The Birth of Sprawl. It’s OKAY that some people are disappointed by the Standard Sessions.

FEMMUSIC: I think based upon what I’ve read on Standard Sessions and hearing The Birth of Sprawl, both are albums that people learn from.

RDG: That people learn from?

FEMMUSIC: Yes. Because…and the problem that you get is, some people just don’t want to learn at that time.

RDG: What a profound thing to say. Wow! That is quite a wonderful way to put it. Hmm. HMM.

FEMMUSIC: The Birth of Sprawl blew away a lot of my image of what jazz was. And instantly connected. Since I’ve been running the magazine, the jazz issue’s one of my favorites to do because I learn the most. Jazz has always been an enigma for me.

RDG: You and a lot of people.

FEMMUSIC: And so doing this issue I always learn things about how the process is done and also how the music is evolving, even now. And I think when you’re doing differences between originals and the interpretation which so much of jazz is, you have the jazz purists who have the image of what the interpretation has to be. The jazz purists want to hear it the same way a thousand times. And everyone else wants to hear how it is yours.

RDG: And really the true spirit of jazz is that you make it yours whether you ruffle feathers or not.

FEMMUSIC: Exactly! And so ruffling feathers is a wonderful thing to do.

RDG: I agree. I tend to worry when I don’t ruffle feathers. So it’s nice to know you can ruffle feathers with a standards album. I knew you could do it with The Birth of Sprawl, but not with a standards album.

FEMMUSIC: Before we get on to with what’s going on in the studio, I have two more questions about Standard Sessions. And the next one is the exact opposite of the last one. What is the biggest challenge making that album?

RDG: Another good question. (thinks) This is a horrible, horrible answer, but one of the things I really enjoyed about making it is that it wasn’t, it felt not as challenging. It was SO much different than making The Birth of Sprawl which really was like a long, long labor, like giving a very painful birth. But the Standard Sessionsseemed to be so easy to do. The only thing was, originally I wanted to work with an arranger, because I’d been listening to a lot of classic CDs with strings and arrangements and things like that, and I wanted to take the pressure off myself from doing arrangements. And what I wanted to do was just sing. And I always wanted to have that luxury, even though I think it’s a self-imposed luxury to do everything. So I had engaged my composition teacher, who’s really, REALLY great, to do the arrangements. And as it worked out, our schedules just totally did not want to jive. So again, sort of way too close to the recording date than I would have wanted, I had to come up with arrangements and then we did do some together, the boys and I. We just got together the day before the studio–we hadn’t played any of the tunes before. So you know, maybe it would have been that just sort of last minute arranging, even though you’ll hear the arrangements aren’t rocket science. I really wanted to go for simplicity because some the arrangements that really impress me, stick out, that I remember are the easy ones, the ones that you can hum after hearing them one time. And I think that’s a good challenge for people writing songs. So I would make these arrangements like, you know, “You’re Not The Kind”-we never talked about that, that’s on the album-and I just wrote this little arrangement that starts out, (sings) “Shoobee ompa dayyyy, shoobee ompa dayyyy, shoobee ompa dayyyy, shoobee ompa ba ompa doo dee doo dum.” So it begins and ends like that. That’s the kind of you know, classic, simple…what I find difficult about doing stuff like that and what I love about the challenge of doing something like that is that it’s all about distillation. And there are a lot of people in this town that are brilliant musicians, and they have brilliant command of jazz harmony and the sophistications of it. But just give me “shobbee ompa dayyy”, just like it might have happened in the 50s at Mr. Kelly’s in Chicago or something like that. So I think although it wasn’t a challenge that could have been described as agonizing, like The Birth of Sprawl was at times, I think that that was a challenge nonetheless.

FEMMUSIC: I was wondering, is Standard Sessions going to be part of a series?

RDG: Yes, it’s going to be part of a two part series, and it’s in the can as of Tuesday.
There’s no tomorrow like today. (laughs) That’s the title of a tune on my next album. So on Tuesday I finish the Standard Sessions. On Monday—no, Monday I finish the “Standard Sessions”. Tuesday I went in and worked on my next CD project, which is an urban blues project. This is the one that I’m over the moon about, and it’s another agonizing project. (laughs) But you’ll probably want to finish your other question before we get to that.

FEMMUSIC: Actually I think we’re there. The two questions blend right together. The questions as I have them written are, ‘Is Standard Sessions part of a series?’ ‘What are you doing with the series?’ And then the question right after is ‘Tell me about the current studio work.’ So, we’re there.

RDG: So I can talk about that?

FEMMUSIC: Yes, you can.

RDG: Yay! My family’s all musical. We all played music when I grew up. And my brother and I went on to do it professionally, and one sister went on to continue studying music and just quit a couple of years ago. But my brother and I went on to do it as a profession. My brother became this really brilliant blues guitarist. And he was older than me, and he was always my hero, so I would always to go to his garage band rehearsals, and I would always be lurking in the shadows somewhere, listening to his band rehearsals. And I always sort of dreamt that we would collaborate, but he lived in Chicago and my family had moved up here, and so we kind of didn’t get to see a whole lot of each other, so we developed these separate careers, but it was always my hope that we would somehow blend them. So we just started blending them a couple of years ago, started to do some gigs together, and I was thinking about recording with my brother. And he got cancer. And six months later he died. So this was a couple of years ago. I became the keeper of my brother’s archives. His wife gave me all his recordings, his recorded archives. He didn’t make any formal CD except one just before he died and he was pretty frail at that point. But he’s the person whose gift was so huge that he really should have had a very illustrious career. And I mean he got to do some illustrious things, like playing at Wrigley Stadium and stuff like that, and doing a bit of touring in Europe. But, I mean, he should have been large. So I got those archives and I’ve been working with them, with my bass player who is co-producing the record, and we’re using ProTools where I’m writing songs that are incorporating my brother’s guitar playing, basically. And so Tuesday we did three, we got three tracks down with brilliant musicians and actually the drummer and the bass player who are on the Standard Sessions, and it exceeds my wildest dreams how well this is turning out. It’s so thrilling and so exciting. You know, for the reason that I’ll be posthumously collaborating with my brother. I’m also doing…it’s BLUES, and blues works its way into all of my music, and now I’m going to be steeped in it, and I have no idea how I’m going to reconcile this with the jazz community. (laughs) Like I really give a shit, but this is really going to have their heads spinning, but I’m so THRILLED. I’m just so thrilled. It sounds amazing.

FEEMUSIC: As a woman in the music industry, have you been discriminated against?

RDG: I feel that as a woman in the music industry, I-we-tend to experience…I was going to say an extra set of challenges ad then you know, I’m not sure they’re an extra set, because male may undoubtedly experience sets of challenges that we don’t. So I wonder if it evens out. But I have to say that I’ve felt the sting of particular challenges because I’m a woman, and I’ll give you an example. This ties into an earlier question. Um, when we were doing the Standard Sessions, there were at least three or four times when I brought things to the bands attention and it was disregarded. Now I find on a one-to-one basis, I have beautiful relationships with all my band members, and we do as a group too. But there’s a certain group mentality that kicks in that sometimes things morph. And that happens as well when a bunch of women are together. It’s a group thing, it’s not a gender thing, I don’t think. And you know, I would say something like we’d be listening to the playback of a track, and they go, “Well that just sounds great, that’s great, yeah, that’s a wrap.” And I’m like, “Umm, what was that buzzing sound?” And they go, “What buzzing sound? I didn’t hear any buzzing sound.” “I distinctly heard a rattling.” “No, no, that’s just the sound of mallets on metal, you know, the vibraphone.” “Well, I don’t know…” “No, no everything’s fine.” Well you know, what strikes me as funny is that the rattle would only come in certain ranges of the vibraphone. Oh no, it’s just the sound of it. Well, and instead of getting into an argument, which is a dead end street , I would say, “Well, let’s just leave it. We’ll get Fred in here”-Fred was the engineer, he also plays vibraphone-“he’ll be able to tell.” So you just leave it. Don’t get in this frigging circular argument. So Fred would come in, and I’d go, “Fred, can you listen to the playback?” and I wouldn’t say anything. And he would listen to it, and he’d go, “Oh god, Daniel, we have to turn your snare off. The vibes are making it rattle.” And you know, I’d feel like punching their heads in. Of course I didn’t. (laughs) And I didn’t do anything that was anywhere near looking like I was the cat that swallowed the mouse. But things like that happened three or four times. Or they wouldn’t get an arrangement, and I would say, “You know, it’s on the ‘and’ of three where you’re supposed to do the stop there, and they would do it over and not do it. “It’s not ON three, it’s on the END of three.” And then they would get irritated sort of at me and they would ask the piano player, because the piano player’s a god, he really is-he is an incredible piano player-and he would say the same thing I did, and they would go, “OK, man.” So it’s shit like that, and you know what, you can’t let it get under your skin. You just have to hang onto your dignity and you work it out when you’re by yourself. But you can’t let it get under your skin because they’re all beautiful people, and I have to just have faith that whatever is going on is part of an evolutionary process. And I can’t, you know, I can’t be too much in a dither about stuff like that. So why the hell am I talking about this? Because discrimination against women, right. So, you know, it was stuff like that, that is something that really gets under my skin. I could go home and cry about it, but at the time I would be, you know, a motherfucker. But I have to say as a woman I have so much respect in this music community, not only as a woman but also as a musician, and I feel blessed in that regard and I also feel like it’s a real achievement on my part, because I’ve always tried to conduct myself…I’m an ambitious person, I’ve always tried to conduct myself professionally, and I’m always been very giving to other people, helpful, and with my creativity too, and I just feel, I really feel, I feel honored and esteemed. And you know, we all have a long, long way to go, but that doesn’t happen too much in the musical community that so many props are given to a woman. Not in the jazz community. And I was going to say something else that I thought was significant….oh, it’s a bit of a point to be made on my part. Women have been so–what is the word? I can’t say it…it’s like “diminutive”, it’s the adverb of that, let’s just say “diminished”-have been so diminished by comparison in the jazz community. Part of that is probably a gender thing. Part of that is deserved. A lot of times with singers, they simply haven’t done the homework that the musicians have. So it seems obvious to me that if you’re going to be in an environment and playing the same game as people who have paid a lot of dues and who have woodshedded a lot, that it’s going to be a little bit annoying if you’re not with the program. So I think on the other hand, I think singers and instrumentalists are two completely different species. And I think that it’s really, it’s an exercise in defeat to try to say the two should be the same, or the two should play the same or sound the same or approach music the same. I think they approach music very differently. And I think those differences need to be celebrated more. And they certainly are celebrated more in other communities. I always tell my singers, like I really get on their backs, my singing students. And I tell them, “You know, look, you’ve got to know how to talk this language, and you’ve got to know what you’re talking about, and you’ve got to know your keys and you’ve got to be able to write your own charts, and you’ve got to be able to conduct the band, you’ve got to be able to know where you are, and all those things.” Because it’s so important for us to do the work. You can’t command the respect without doing the work.

FEMMUSIC: I agree.

RDG: You do?

FEMMUSIC: I do. I see it with people that I follow as they evolve. And it’s more than just jazz or blues, it’s all genres of…part of it is the learned…

RDG: One thing that I would say I find with my students, they don’t listen to records. Well of course they listen to records, but even though I’m, you know, youngish, I learned this through records. I learned what I do through listening to sides and wearing them out. And I would love to see people, apart from the other advice that I normally give my students, I would like to see them listening a whole lot more to records and listening very actively. I gave one of my students a track of Connie Boswell, who I think is one of the finest singers that have ever walked the earth, and the finest musicians, and woman geniuses, and I said, “Go home. When you come back, I want you to learn this note for note. ” And she came back, and she NAILED it. And this is a person who just started singing last year, and has no real formal musical education. And she thrilled me. She made me glad to be a teacher–I’m always glad to be a teacher–but she just thrilled me and made my day. She could do it note for note. And if I could impress upon my students that if you do that with a few records, you know, you’re really going to have such a rich understanding of the music. But that’s hard work, and there are few people that really want to do hard work. And that’s why some of my students come here, and I just play the piano and let them sing and give them a few pointers, because I know if I push them beyond that they’ll run away because the fantasy is so fragile, you know. So I would say if I had to pick something, I would say really study and learn note for note some sides, some really good sides.