‘Get to the art’

When Camille Thurman sings, her buttery, luminous voice and comforting warmth tempt you to close your eyes out of sheer pleasure. 

But keep them open. Otherwise, you’ll miss it when she casually picks up a saxophone and flips from the vocal language of Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan to the ineffable, wordless domain of saxophone giants John Coltrane and Wayne Shorter without any fanfare or fuss.

Thurman, the guest artist in residence this week for Michigan State University jazz studies, makes it look natural. But her ability to tell her story seamlessly, in two demanding and distinct musical disciplines, makes you feel that human beings can do anything.

“I’ve always treated both talents as one. That’s how I trained them,” she said. “I started singing when I was 4. Going back and forth like that, starting at a young age, it almost became one instrument. When I sing, it’s almost like an extension of the horn, and the horn is an extension of the voice.” 

She will work with the jazz orchestras at MSU all week, culminating in concert Friday (March 3) at the Fairchild Theatre that includes a special premiere.

Thurman is a master at interpreting jazz standards, often in the manner of her idol, Sarah Vaughan, but she’s also bringing some of her own music for students to dig into. (Oh, did I forget to mention that Thurman is also a stimulating and fresh voice as a composer? My bad.) “In Due Time,” a sizzling sunburst of syncopated scat singing powered by Brazilian rhythms and bebop energy, will get its big-band debut at Friday’s concert.

“It’s not often you get to perform with a big band, so I wanted to make it special,” she said.

There’s nothing wrong with the umpteenth iteration of “Body and Soul,” but MSU students will have plenty more to chew on in two additional Thurman originals: “Pursuit with a Purpose,” a gently propulsive waltz with deep spiritual overtones and lots of room for expressive solo work, and “Origins,” a probing, intricate composition full of mercurial mood shifts.

“I want to challenge them, give them an opportunity to step up to the plate,” Thurman said. “That’s why we have residencies like this, to help them grow and go beyond what they might even think they’re capable of at this level.”

In spite of Thurman’s many responsibilities as a bandleader, vocalist, saxophone player and composer, the message she brings onstage is to slow down, linger and drift within the joys and discoveries of the moment. 

“The best part of being a performing artist is being able to get on stage, shut your brain off from all that other stuff and really get to the heart of the music, perform with the band,” she said. “That’s where we live and where we thrive. The other stuff is important, but the purpose is to get to the art.”

Thurman’s overwhelming talent and obvious love of sharing music make her career seem inevitable, but that’s an illusion. The jazz world almost didn’t get to unwrap her varied gifts.

Not long ago, she was studying to become a geologist at New York’s Binghamton University.

“I aced the first year,” she recalled.

What she didn’t know was that most of the geology professors at Binghamton were also musicians. Inevitably, word of Thurman’s musical gifts reached saxophonist Mike Carbone, the school’s director of jazz studies. 

The problem was that Thurman was in a bad phase, having endured what she described as a gauntlet of sexism at the highly competitive Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts in Manhattan. 

She and a handful of other female students were shut out of performing opportunities and treated with condescension, she said.

“We went through the last two years of high school having a hard time because we were denied the opportunity to play and to learn,” Thurman said. “This was way before #MeToo and the later movement toward inclusivity. By the time I got out of high school, I didn’t want anything to do with music. I was done. I thought, ‘I guess this is how it is.’”

(Efforts to seek comment from the New York City Department of Education were unsuccessful.)

At Binghamton, Carbone gently tried to drag Thurman away from mica, quartz and feldspar, assuring her that she and her fellow female students would be treated with respect. 

“I told him, ‘You’ve got the wrong person,’” she said. “But he was so patient with me. It was the first time in a long time I felt like I was in a space where I felt welcome to learn and play.”

To up the ante, Carbone invited powerhouse saxophonist Tia Fuller (who hit MSU with a big bang during a recent visit) to campus for a residency.

Thurman had not yet seen a woman make a career as a saxophonist.

“The two of them made me realize this is where I should be,” Thurman said. She jokingly called it an “intervention.”

“They said, ‘Why are you studying rocks? You have the heart of a musician, and that’s where you belong.’”

She hopes to pass that lesson along this week at MSU.

“I hope that while I’m there, some young women can say, ‘Hey, there’s space for us to do this,’ just like Tia and me.”

Thurman finished her earth science degree but also found her way back to the sweeter strata of song, placing third in the 2013 Sarah Vaughan International Jazz Vocal Competition. Since then, she’s performed with a host of music luminaries, including funk and R&B icon Chaka Khan, jazz legend Benny Golson, organist Lonnie Smith and trumpeter Nicholas Payton. She’s won awards for her compositions and issued three superb albums.

Her ever-expanding composing and playing palette has gone through several phases.

Some of her influences include the underrated, spiritually deep bassist Buster Williams; saxophone legend Wayne Shorter; and R&B vocalist and jazz pianist Patrice Rushen, but her sound is always her own — a seamless fusion of sophisticated formal design and heartfelt emotion.

“It’s never a finite process,” she said. “Over the last 10 years, it’s been a matter of finding people I resonated with, trying to see myself in what they do, and then seeing how I can do it in my own voice.”

The almost metabolic process from absorption to self-expression, fueled by an unquenchable love of music, is one of the joys she’ll share with students this week — a sound formula in both music and life.

“My process is finding the stuff I love, trying to understand why I love it — what makes it so great — and figuring out how can I bring it to where I am.”