Several Montavilla Jazz Festival performances from Sept. 4-6 celebrate some of Portland’s women jazz artists, including Rebecca Sanborn, Lo Steele, Jesse Marquez, Idit Shner and jazz singer/composer Shelly Rudolph. Stay tuned for Oregon ArtsWatch writer Lynn Darroch’s story on all of them.

Among the women’s shows, Rudolph’s Orfea Rising is an ambitious crossover jazzy-chamber work with two aerial artists, a jazz band, and Rudolph as the central figure. A composer, songwriter, vocalist and poet, Rudolph will perform her work with a five-piece jazz band at 11:30 am Sept. 5 at Portland Metro Arts. Her band includes cellist Tim Gilson, Andrew Jones on bass, Chris Lee on vibes, saxophonist Devin Phillips and drummer Rivkah Ross.

The piece is a highly personal take on – and takeoff from – the Orpheus myth.

Orfea Rising is not about a female version of Orpheus, mythology’s charming grief-stricken musician, nor about Eurydice, his nymph-lover whom Orpheus retrieved from the Underworld. As the myth goes, on his journey to higher ground, Orpheus looked back, perhaps to see if his lover was still there. (His bargain with Hades required him to swear not to.) Before he reached the “upper” world, and because he betrayed his promise, Orpheus lost his lover forever. That tragic story has been done over and over from numerous points of view in opera, onstage, with poetry and visual art.

Rudolph’s Orfea Rising is about a woman, musical as you’ve likely guessed, who is motivated by love, then broken by it, pulled into a version of the Underworld, and survives. She is ultimately empowered and deepened by her journey as she rises from the depths to help and heal others.

“I didn’t set out to write a retelling of the myth from beginning to end,” Rudolph explained by email shortly before the jazz festival. “The songs and poems arrived first. Only later did I begin to recognize the story they were telling. Maybe that’s how stories happen. We live them first. We make them into stories when we look back.”

The piece begins with a curious and clever “Ariadne” and it ends with confident, free-thinking, free-spirited “Wild Bird.” As Rudolph explains about Ariadne, the character who gave Theseus the thread that allows him to find his way out of the labyrinth, “there’s a beautiful parallel between the Ariadne and the Orpheus myths. Ariadne provides the means for Theseus to free himself from the labyrinth, while Orpheus is given the means to return from the Underworld. Both stories hinge on whether it’s possible to find your way back out after going in – and what or who actually leads you home.”

Note: Slow the Wind: Ariadne’s Lead is printed here in part.

Slow the Wind: Ariadne’s Lead

Re-anchoring
Dropping deep

Untethered, gaze tilted in
 Guided by a garland of stars
 A gift of delight and demise
Hair loose now, dance uncoiled
 Armor shed upon the shore
 Languid limbs at long last made free
 Softly seized, salt and sea and poetry
Calls unanswered, messages received
Slow the wind
 Take me to the gentle place.

Wild Bird

I am a wild bird, a fly away thing
I am all that and more, I am everything
I am a melody that makes your hips swing
A storm a serenade, the first rush of spring.
I am the soil, the ocean that feeds
A dark night, the alright
That makes your soul sing
A look, a dream, that lingers so sweet
A whiskey, a mother, and that is everything
I am a woman this glorious thing
I am all that and more I am everything.

The making of the hour-long piece has lingered in Rudolph’s imagination for about 10 years, she said in mid-August, taking a break in her woodland, vine-wrapped Portland home. It percolated even longer, she said; even as a teenager, she was obsessed by the film Black Orpheus and watched it over and over. Then music started to take over. Her junior year in high school in Eugene she was chosen to solo for the jazz choir and sang “When I Meet My Man.” Despite her weeks of pre-concert stage fright, that solo started her musical journey. Jazz singing would be her vocation, and became her occupation.

Now a busy and in-demand Portland jazz singer and songwriter, she’s known to many jazz faithfuls from her regular gigs with longtime Portland pianist Tom Grant at Lake Oswego’s Lakehouse and elsewhere (read Lynn Darroch’s profile of Grant here). This year, Rudolph appeared at the Portland Jazz Festival as a warm-up act for jazz singer Madeleine Peyroux at a packed Revolution Hall and pulled off a gorgeous arrangement of John Lennon’s “Imagine” with guitarist Dan Gildea.

Her breathy alto can belt out the blues and R&B like Janis Joplin or Etta James. She can capture longing and complicated love as Norah Jones does in her emotion-heavy songs. You’ll hear her flexible range throughout L’Orfea and listen to her love of spoken-word art as she performs her poems. For this work, she composed 10 songs and three poems, written over the past several years. Among her favorite wordsmiths are e e cummings, Rumi, Pablo Neruda, Mary Oliver, Leonard Cohen, Derek Walcott and Jeff Buckley. Joni Mitchell fits into her inspirations, too.

An enterprising and intimate piece, Orfea Rising certainly ranks among her most ambitious works, she said, though she has recorded several albums. In 2020 she created a livestreamed show, The Way We Live Now due to Covid (live shows weren’t happening) from her LP The Way We Love, released earlier in the year. That show, performed at Portland’s Alberta Rose Theatre, featured Alicia Antony and Tia Palomino, the same dancers who will appear in Orfea.

Her composition and concept, she said, “create a funny and beautiful paradox in a piece whose central question is: What if she doesn’t look back? For me, there’s a difference between looking back and recognizing the story we’ve lived, and the kind of looking back that undoes Orpheus — looking back from fear or doubt, needing proof that the beloved is still there.”

To see more of Rudolph’s wordplay, check out the Unwrapped section on her website.