Mary Stallings at San Jose Jazz Winter Fest at Cafe Stritch

GA $30 advance, $35 door

Mary Stallings is a classic example of how it takes time, musical seasoning and living a full life to mature as a vocalist and to address a lyric properly. While youthful instrumentalists may have something to say, Stallings brings a lifetime of emotional intelligence that enables her to truly inhabit a lyric.

Born and raised in San Francisco, the middle child of 11 siblings, Stallings started performing professionally before the age of 10 with her mother and two older sisters in a family gospel group. She got her first real taste of jazz at home, sitting in at rehearsals with her uncle, tenor saxophonist and bandleader Orlando Stallings. Stallings’ career got off to an early start in the late ’50s and her supple voice landed her in rarified air: performing with such luminaries as Ben Webster, Cal Tjader, Earl Hines, Red Mitchell, Teddy Edwards, and the Montgomery brothers (Wes, Monk, and Buddy) in Bay Area night clubs such as Hungry i, The Purple Onion and El Matador....

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GA $30 advance, $35 door

Mary Stallings is a classic example of how it takes time, musical seasoning and living a full life to mature as a vocalist and to address a lyric properly. While youthful instrumentalists may have something to say, Stallings brings a lifetime of emotional intelligence that enables her to truly inhabit a lyric.

Born and raised in San Francisco, the middle child of 11 siblings, Stallings started performing professionally before the age of 10 with her mother and two older sisters in a family gospel group. She got her first real taste of jazz at home, sitting in at rehearsals with her uncle, tenor saxophonist and bandleader Orlando Stallings. Stallings’ career got off to an early start in the late ’50s and her supple voice landed her in rarified air: performing with such luminaries as Ben Webster, Cal Tjader, Earl Hines, Red Mitchell, Teddy Edwards, and the Montgomery brothers (Wes, Monk, and Buddy) in Bay Area night clubs such as Hungry i, The Purple Onion and El Matador.

Perhaps Stallings’ best-known recording was the 1961 Cal Tjader Plays, Mary Stallings Sings on Fantasy Records, which brought engagements in Tokyo, Manila and Bangkok along with work up and down the West Coast. She spent a year in the late 1960s performing in Nevada with Billy Eckstine, and toured South America with Gillespie’s band in 1965 and 1966. She has shared the bill with such luminaries as Joe Williams, Tony Bennett and Ella Fitzgerald. From 1969-1972, she enjoyed a successful three-year residency in the Count Basie Orchestra. After touring with the Basie orchestra, she devoted her time to raising her only child, R&B singer Adriana Evans.

Stallings returned to full-time singing in the early 1980s and returned to the recording studio with the 1994 release of I Waited for You on Concord Jazz with pianist Gene Harris. Spectrum followed in 1995 with pianist Gerald Wiggins and trumpeter Harry “Sweets” Edison, while her next album, 1997’s Manhattan Moods featured pianist Monty Alexander, and 2005’s Remember Love was produced by Geri Allen, who played piano and organ and also provided all of the arrangements. Her most recent release, 2012’s Don’t Look Back, had Christopher Loudon proclaiming in JazzTimes magazine, “Stallings and Eric Reed…achieve the same sort of rare, supreme simpatico as Ella and Louis, or Sinatra and Riddle.”

Her performance credits include the Monterey Jazz Festival (1965, 1995, 2003), San Francisco Jazz Festival (2001, 2004, 2006), the Blue Note Jazz Club in New York with Clark Terry (2005), the Savannah Music Festival (2007) and Jazz at Lincoln Center for “The Birth of Cool.”

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