Photograph by Mike DeFilippo
Waiting to go onstage, Denise Thimes wondered whether she should have spent the money—money she could have applied to her kids’ tuition at New City School—to come on this cruise one more time, invited but unpaid. She was glad that she was still taking crazy chances at 48—but she was reaching a point where she needed a little security. Somebody’s got to hear me, she told herself, somebody who can help make things a little bit better.
She took one last deep breath and strode onstage, 6-foot-2, her full black-and-gold skirt swishing around her ankles. She heard a pleased murmur from the crowd, then felt the ship lurch beneath her feet. Funny how you can’t feel all that movement when you’re sitting in the audience, she thought, only up here. She braced herself, gave her audience a dazzling slow smile, caught the trio’s beat and exhaled the first low syllable of “My Romance.”
The real world dropped away.
“When I first heard Denise, she reminded me of the great singers of the past—Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan and Carmen McRae,” says Don Wolff, now in his 15th year as jazz host for KMOX. “They could make you laugh, they could make you cry, they could just make you feel good. Nobody had ever matched them—but I thought to myself, ‘Here’s a woman who has the talent to be in that group.’”
Her mind was on the ballads now, adding color, embellishing the notes to pull out every nuance of emotion. She sang one standard after another—nothing new or contrived, no flash or fusion—and finished with “Embraceable You,” her voice cradling the words in satin.
“Denise Thimes is simply the finest new female jazz vocalist in the past 25 years,” says former New York jazz-club owner Tom “Papa” Ray, who co-owns Vintage Vinyl and spins music for KDHX. “There’s so much power in her voice, and it’s effortless—you never hear her strain. She has flawless command, a wonderful sense of rhythm, a knowing intelligence and the ability to make the words glisten with new meaning. I never have to hear ‘Embraceable You’ again in my life; however, if Denise Thimes is going to sing ‘Embraceable You,’ I want to hear it.”
She sang the last notes and walked through thundering applause to her table. Almost immediately she felt a hand on her shoulder. “Miss Thimes? Mr. Clark Terry would like to see you.”
Thimes figured the St. Louis–born Terry was just feeling nostalgic—but she knew he was a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master who’d played trumpet alongside Count Basie and Duke Ellington, influenced Miles Davis, recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra, received a Grammy Award and been knighted in Germany.
So as she walked toward him, her heart beat a little faster.
“You’re from St. Louis, too?” he asked.
“Yes, Mr. Terry. I met you when you were at Jazz at the Bistro.”
“Who are you working with?”
“I’m not working with anybody, Mr. Terry.”
“Well, who’s your manager?”
“I don’t have a manager.”
“You have any CDs? Whose label are you on?”
“I’m ... not on anybody’s label.”
He said some nice things—the sort of things people have been saying to her for 25 years—and it made her bold enough to tease him: “Mr. Terry, I’m going to do you like Dianne Reeves used to do. I’m going to come to your gigs and have you to say, ‘Come up.’”
He grinned back at her: “Come on.”
Terry gave Thimes the date of his next show: Flushing Town Hall in Queens in late November, nine days later. But she had just paid for her tickets to the cruise; she didn’t have the money to fly to New York.
Back home, two friends from church heard the story. “Get your ticket,” they said, handing her money.
When she arrived, she realized that what she’d thought would be Clark Terry and maybe two other musicians was an all-star lineup with Dr. Billy Taylor on piano, Earl May on bass, Jimmy Heath on sax, Tootie Heath on drums and Benny Powell on trombone. Doesn’t get any bigger than this, she muttered to herself.
Normally Thimes gets excited before a performance, nervous with anticipation maybe, but not scared. She didn’t even have butterflies at age 8, when she sang her first public solo, a funeral hymn in a sweltering church on a still, heavy summer afternoon, and heard “Sing, baby!” and “Yes, Lord!” rise up from the congregation.
But at Flushing, her insides were popping like spring toys.
Four tunes into the first set, she heard Heath say, “Ladies and gentlemen, there’s a young lady Clark Terry has invited to perform.” Polite applause, light but cordial. As instructed, Thimes sang her opener from the cruise, “My Romance”—and the audience came alive. When she came back in the second set and sang “Embraceable You,” they were on their feet, hollering for more. She thanked them and left the stage; this wasn’t her gig. Heath called her right back out. She sang “I’ve Got the World on a String,” and people leaped to their feet again.
“You melted this audience down,” the Flushing Hall booking agent told her afterward, “and this is a tough jazz audience.”
In its midst that night was Phoebe Jacobs, executive vice president of the Louis Armstrong Foundation and jazz-world royalty. After she heard Thimes, she murmured, “It’s like Ella and Sarah Vaughan all over again.”
In March, when the call came to sing six nights running at the Blue Note, the famous jazz club in Manhattan, Thimes was in the produce section of Dierbergs. She closed her cellphone and, heedless of the retirees fingering Yukon Golds, put her fist in the air: “Yes! I’m going to the Blue Note!”
She’d dreamed of singing there ever since she’d switched from gospel to jazz, a shift that clicked into place two decades ago at North St. Louis’ venerable Moose Lounge.
Thimes’ mother hadn’t wanted her to go that night; she didn’t want her daughter labeled a club singer. “Mom, I gotta do the Moose, because that’s where the real jazz scene is,” Thimes pleaded. She remembers standing onstage, singing Roberta Flack’s “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” and having what she can only describe as an out-of-body experience: “When I closed my eyes, I could see a bright light. For a moment I just wasn’t even there. And for some reason that was a confirmation for me that I was going to sing jazz.”
She’s seen that white light only once since: singing gospel in a drafty cathedral in Germany, wondering whether she was pregnant.
She was.
Denise Thimes has been bouncing on the end of a springboard for 26 years now, eyes trained straight ahead, every muscle poised for takeoff. Now she’s in midair, wondering whether she’ll whack down on the board again or soar.
Why a national launch has taken so long is a jazz lover’s parlor game, but the theories fall into three main categories: She’s a single mom, she loves St. Louis and she’s too blunt for her own good.
“She’s a mother of two beautiful kids, and they have come first,” Terry says. “She was not in the position to put herself in the right places.”
Wolff, a lawyer by day, blames economics and politics: “Record companies either put out new young jazz singers because they have money to burn or they take a loss, and as willing as she might have been, Denise just didn’t have the people—the horses, as they say, the pitchmen and promoters. So because she doesn’t have a manager to fight for her, she has to be tough—and she can overwhelm people. What you need in an agent, if you try to do it yourself, will turn people off.”
Thimes’ pastor, the Rev. Donald Hunter of New Sunny Mount Missionary Baptist Church, has a different theory: “It’s about St. Louis. You almost have to go outside St. Louis to get that break. Being familiar causes us to overlook the genius that is in some people.”
“We don’t know why it hasn’t happened yet,” blurts Thimes’ right hand, Valerie Granger, who has helped her organize concerts for 15 years now. Everybody pitches in to help with the kids when Thimes has a gig, Granger says. “Sometimes I do hate to have a meeting at her house,” she concedes, “because we will be interrupted 50 times! She’s saying, ‘I forgot to make their lunch!’ or ‘Jabril’s got basketball’—or soccer or track. I’m, like, ‘OK, Denise, you should’ve had this done.’ There’s a lot of juggling.”
Granger smoothly catches balls that drop; she’s seen Thimes’ potential since they were girls in the church choir together. “When she started singing professionally, she was trying to do everything by herself,” Granger recalls. “She probably wondered what my motive was, because we weren’t close like we are now, but I thought, ‘This girl can sing, and one day she’s going to make it, and whatever I can do to help her, I’m going to do.’”
“Honey, I wish I had me a Valerie!” croons beloved St. Louis singer Mae Wheeler. “Oooh my God. You need that peace of mind, knowing somebody has your back.” And then, continues Wheeler, you have to leave town. “You pick up your suitcases and go, because it’s not gonna happen here. We are too familiar with each other.”
Wheeler sees her own racehorse spirit in Thimes, and she tries to rein the younger woman in a little. “You have to be a determined woman, a woman who knows where she’s going and how she wants to get there—but it doesn’t leave a good taste in people’s mouths, because we become very overbearing,” Wheeler says. “I know what they call me behind my back; I tell them, ‘Just put a “Miss” in front of it.’ I coach Denise, tell her not to be so bossy. It comes from being on your own and not having that man figure in your life to take on some of the responsibility. You are totally responsible for everything, so you are not ready to take no nothin’ from nobody—and people see that attitude.
“No one told me those things, they just kind of talked behind my back, and it made me a little bit worse,” Wheeler continues. “I tell Denise to lighten up and be a little cooler, lay back a little bit. I say, ‘These people don’t know you yet. You gotta be strong to be ready for the real Denise.’”
Granger keeps a shortlist of what makes Thimes mad: “A band playing for her that’s not pullin’ it, they’re draggin’, and she has to give them the beats. It makes her mad if I’m not on point, following through. If you don’t pull your weight, if you drop the ball—because in this business you have to be on point.”
Even singing with Terry in New York—her big break—Thimes got upset because she didn’t think that the rhythm section was giving enough.
“You are new on the scene,” Terry reminded her. “Just cool it. They are doing the best they can do.”
“I think she needed that little talking-to,” he says now. “She thanked me.”
In April, Thimes performed for seven days with Terry at the International Jazzfestival Bern in Switzerland. Back home again, she lit some “serenity” incense, put on the kettle to make detox tea and flopped into a big chair in her living room, surrounded by woven fabrics in earthy browns and blacks, bittersweet and pumpkin orange; African masks and a carved wooden giraffe; pillows, baskets, oft-lit pillar candles and framed photographs of everyone she loves.
“Stay out of T.J. Maxx and Marshall’s, Denise,” Granger warns her regularly. “You can’t put anything more in here!”
“Shopping is my thing,” Thimes protests. “I don’t drink, I don’t do drugs, I’m not a liar—so I shop.” Her laugh gurgles, then spills over. Life amuses her, and when she’s tickled by something, she doesn’t brush it aside and move on; she lets it linger long enough to find it even funnier.
But in a flash she turns serious again. A trained stage actress, Thimes modulates intensity and emotion with perfect control—yet seems in every moment to be completely honest, open, almost helplessly herself.
“I always wanted to be a powerful, dynamic black woman,” she confides, “because I saw so many of those women in my church. I wanted to be strong; I wanted to tell people what to do. I thought that was power. As we mature, we learn how to talk to people.” That last platitude sounds a little stiff—until she adds wryly, “Sometimes it may not come out the way it should. If you set a standard for yourself, people have a tendency to label you and say that you are difficult—well, I know a lot of successful difficult people, and I leave it at that.
“It’s interesting,” she says a second later, unable to leave it after all: “When we are out there aimlessly, we are no trouble to anyone. As soon as we find our own voice, everybody has a problem with that.”
A middle child—the striver—Thimes can’t remember any real childhood trauma: “The hardest part of my childhood was having big feet.” By her teenage years, though, those feet meant serious sorrow: “Guys didn’t come up and ask me to dance. I went through that image thing, what do you call it? Self-esteem.” Did she at least go to Sumner High’s prom? “No, because I heard that was the night guys tried to get in your pants, and I didn’t want any guys in my pants.”
When Hunter came to pastor Sunny Mount, in 1977, Thimes was a teenager in the choir. “She was not singing about God,” he says. “She was singing like she knew God.”
“I don’t know anything but what they call blind faith,” Thimes says now. “I’ve only worked a few jobs, and the rest of my life has been dictated by how often my telephone rings. My finances are never predictable. As a single mother, I have had to step out on some deep waters in my life. But one thing I do know is that my needs will be met.”
One of the first songs her quiet, devout mother taught her was “Precious Lord.” Thimes sings the first verse, drawing out the soulfulness, embellishing the notes that matter, and the air in the living room vibrates with emotion. Her eyes are smiling, her expression faraway. “I auditioned in New York for the part of Dr. Dorothy Height, a civil-rights icon, with this director from hell, George Faison. He asks me to the callbacks, and I prep the song they tell me to, and then Mr. Faison says”—she deepens her voice for the impersonation, sweeping her arm and tilting her hand as though commanding a whim—“‘I want you to sing ... “Precious Lord.”’
“Now, that’s a hard song to sing—but I closed my eyes, and I remembered my mother giving me how she wanted me to sing that song, and I sang the first few lines, and he yelled, ‘Shut up, girl! Shut up!’ He had heard enough. I was Dorothy.”
She studied acting at Spelman College (Spike Lee was a senior when she was a freshman, and she sang on his School Daze soundtrack). She’s played leading roles with the Black Rep, gone on national tour and had a recent run in Menopause: The Musical—but singing’s her first love, the one that comes as naturally as breathing. “I think—oh, Lord have mercy—my singing is the place I can go and I don’t have to have anybody tell me what to do or how long I can stay or when I have to leave or how I have to look,” she says in a rush. “My singing is the place where I go for Denise—so when I get up and sing, I don’t bring my problems to you. If I’ve had a rough day, that only makes me sing better, because I can release all that. I don’t have to sing dreary songs; I wouldn’t dare do that to my audience. But now when I get to a ballad you better believe it’s gonna be delivered.”
Her cellphone rings, for the fourth time in as many minutes. “Well, now, I don’t usually do the Mary Kay thing, but I will do the Mary Kay thing for you,” she tells the person calling. “No, Mary Kay’s cool, I like Mary Kay, she’s come a long way!” A long pause, and her voice sobers: “I know, honey, you’re not the only one, believe me. Every now and then we just call each other and say, ‘Hey, girl, just checking on you,’ ’cause everybody is feeling the crunch, believe me. We have to keep each other encouraged.”
The words could’ve been about time, or money, or kids, or men. Thimes talks freely about every category except the last.
“Men, that’s kinda a little touchy thing,” says Granger. “They’re kind of intimidated by Denise. She’s big and tall and she’s got it goin’ on.” She does have “a special person” in her life now, Granger adds, and other close friends use the same deliberately mysterious phrase. Lord knows she’s been hurt before.
Granger knows Thimes so well, she could write a manual: “Rule one? Oooh Lord. Don’t pay attention to her yellin’ and screamin’, just let her yell and scream. She doesn’t mean it from the heart. Rule two, take her out to dinner; she loves to eat. We had a get-together, and everybody was asking me, ‘Can she cook? Should I eat before I go?’ Oh man. She’ll have her gumbo, baked chicken, corn bread, strawberry shortcake—she always makes a cake. But now she doesn’t bake as well as she cooks.”
On May 8, Thimes sang for the queen of England, President George W. Bush and the British ambassador in Washington, D.C. A friend from church designed her dress: “I know it’s light blue,” Thimes said vaguely the week before. Was she practicing her curtsy? “That’s what somebody said I’d have to do! But I’m just gonna say, ‘What’s up?’” She raised her arm in a laconic greeting many would pay hard cash to see the queen return.
Then came her annual Mother’s Day benefit concert—this year with Clark Terry flying in to play at her gig. An hour before the show, she was barefoot on the stage, dialing her cellphone to find out where her musicians were. They’d gone upstairs to the catered dinner. “Well, escort them to the head of the line and get them back here,” Thimes said crossly, bending to slide on high heels for a photographer. She clumped across the stage, awkward as a teenager, and then somebody put music on, and she started to scat it and quite literally found her balance, her body relaxing into a sensuous grace, her face clearing into joy as she sang.
When the audience bustled in, packing the Sheldon, her father, Lou “Fatha” Thimes—a beloved blues and R&B DJ for decades—rose to introduce her. (In Papa Ray’s opinion, the elder Thimes is the reason “Denise can wreck the house singing blues.”)
“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen,” Fatha Thimes said in his low, melodious voice. He made a few calm remarks, then burst: “My daughter sang for the queen of England!”
Her children introduced the other musicians, who crushed every stereotype: a white guy who looked like an FBI agent in the ’50s on bass; a tiny Asian woman who could whomp out blues piano; a Latina drummer. Thimes’ focus was on their talent and on her audience: warmly calling out greetings by name, handing out roses to women she wanted to honor, coaxing her churchgoing audience to loosen up for a little lowdown dirty blues.
Terry appeared after intermission, and when he grabbed the mic and sang a little right back at Thimes, and they teasingly outdid each other with nonsensical scat, and he, 87, made his trumpet soar with her voice ... there wasn’t a single jiggle or rustle in the audience. Even the knee-tapping stilled in awe.
“She’s sensational. She satisfies everyone,” Terry had said earlier by phone. “Her diction is beautiful—and she takes her time. She’s in complete command. You can’t expect that from most people.” He paused, then added with satisfaction, “We don’t have anything to worry about for Denise Thimes, if she can spread herself around to all the places that want her now.”
Her 12-year-old son, Jabril Saleem, is expecting fame to arrive any minute. He’s a little worried about the future of family game night (board and card games on Saturdays, with popcorn) but says in a firm, near-adult voice, “It’s her time.” Then he adds what, for him, is the best part: “We’ll be able to stay at the school that we go to.”
Jabril’s sister, 9-year-old Simone, once caught her mother in a low moment and promised, “Mommy, you gonna knock ’em dead!” But most days Thimes keeps doubts away from her kids. Asked what makes her mother sad, Simone has to think carefully. Then it hits her: “She really hates litter.”
Listening, Thimes chuckles long and low. It’s her kids who keep her motivated, she says—her kids, her drive and her safety net of St. Louis friends, family and church.
The very things that observers say held her back.
“I don’t have it made yet,” Thimes continues quickly, “but it’s a good start. There are moments when I allow myself to embrace it, because I have worked really hard—and then I roll my sleeves up again: back to life, back to reality, back to the tuition bills.”
In between, she sang for a live PBS special in May, opened for Tony Bennett at the Chase in June, then left for Harlem to perform with Earl May.
If Thimes does make it big, will it change her, distance her? Her pastor smiles: “I think Denise will have the problem of trying to take everybody with her.”
