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Hailing the Queen: Dana Owens sings the
standards |
She
first made her mark as the Queen of Hip-Hop, becoming the first
female rapper to notch a gold record with Black Reign and
opening the door for a generation of women rappers to follow.
But these days, Queen Latifah
is making a whole different kind of musical noise, having
released two successive albums — The Dana Owens Album and
Trav’lin’ Light — in which she sings standards from the
realms of jazz, soul, blues and the great American songbook.
Suddenly, the Queen of
Hip-Hop sees a musical future for herself that few would have
envisioned when she arrived on the scene with her debut CD,
All Hail The Queen, in 1989.
“I’ve always envisioned that I could sing songs like this for
the rest of my life,” Latifah said. “It would be mighty cool to
be like Tony Bennett.”
Actually, considering the
nonmusical success Latifah has enjoyed — as a talk show host on
The Queen Latifah Show, playing a lead character in
numerous feature films, not to mention being co-owner of a film
production company and co-manager of her own career — it’s hard
to envision her devoting all her efforts toward a single pursuit
such as singing.
But Latifah certainly sounds like she is enjoying this new phase
in the music side of her career, noting she had wanted to do CDs
like The Dana Owens Album and the newly released
Trav’lin’ Light for many years.
“I looked at this as part of
me growing up, that I could sort of release this side of
myself,” Latifah said during a mid-September phone interview. “I
just always feel like the more I go on through my career, that
I’ll be able to explore different sides of my talents and
abilities and be able to share that with the world. That’s
always my hope. Sometimes things work and sometimes they don’t.
But I’m always on the optimistic side.”
When it comes to business,
there actually haven’t been many setbacks for the woman who was
born in Newark,
N.J. in 1970 as Dana Owens.
She made an immediate impact
with All Hail the Queen, which yielded the hit single
“Ladies First,” and then really broke through with her third CD,
Black Reign. A single from that 1993 album, “U.N.I.T.Y.,”
went to the Top 10 on the R&B chart and won her a Grammy for
best solo rap performance.
In those early years, Latifah focused on her immediate goals,
but she knew it was just the first stage of her career.
“First of all, I had to
become a rapper,” Latifah said. “I had to establish myself as a
female. I had to establish myself as a business person running
[my] own management company — and even push forward rap music in
general, because back then people were still calling it a trend
that’s going to die out. But I always saw the future; I felt
like it could go on and on and expand.”
Actually, even as Black
Reign went gold and established Latifah as a legitimate
female rap star, she had already begun pursuing acting, with
roles in the movies Jungle Fever, House Party 2
and Juice, and an appearance on the TV series The
Fresh Prince of Bel Air.
Her big acting break, though,
came in 1993, when she landed a co-starring role in the Fox
television series Living Single. The show enjoyed a
four-year run before it was canceled in 1997.
Latifah returned to music and released Order in the Court
the next year, which took her music in more of an R&B direction.
But acting was still very much a priority. In 1998, she had
roles in the movies Sphere and Living Out Loud. In
the latter movie, she sang several jazz standards, a hint of the
direction her music would take six years later with The Dana
Owens Album.
Now, Latifah’s acting career
is at a new peak. She’s been in several highly successful films
in recent years, including The Bone Collector,
Bringing Down the House, Chicago (for which she
received an Oscar nomination for best supporting actress) and
just this summer, Hairspray.
But this fall, she’ll devote
her time to headlining a tour focusing on material from The
Dana Owens Album and Trav’lin’ Light.
Musically, the two CDs are
closely related, she said.
“I think the main thing that separates this album and the last
album is I really wanted to do some big band on the last album,
and I really didn’t get to, some big band swing kind of stuff,”
Latifah said. “So I did get to do two [songs] on this album in
that vein.”
Latifah said she is feeling
more confident than ever about performing these new songs live.
“I did like 25 dates (in
2005) with Erykah Badu and Jill Scott on the Sugarwater
Festival, and I did a bunch of dates last summer,” she said. “So
I think I just started to feel more comfortable singing live,
entire shows, whereas I had never really done that before.”
Queen Latifah will perform at
8 p.m. Nov. 7 at the Raymond Kravis Center for the Performing
Arts in West Palm Beach. For tickets, visit www.ticketmaster.com.
Her previously scheduled performance at 8 p.m. Nov. 11 at the
Fillmore at the Jackie Gleason Theater has been canceled.
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