Maintaining
“Folkyjazzy” South Pas guitarist Jennifer Robin on finally feeling ready to take on James Taylor, living with cancer and the medicinal effects of M&Ms in a heat wave
By Bliss 07/10/2008
When the mercury rises, many people beeline for the beach. Others, like South Pasadena musician Jennifer Robin, crank the TV in sweltering A/C-free apartments and … eat M&Ms. Chocolate: the cure-all for metaphysical and meteorological ills.
“I’ve been off of them for about a year,” Robin giggles, “but then the heat came and I got desperate. I’ve gotten rid of most of my vices, except for coffee and M&Ms.”
Relinquishing said vices was no mere ritual for Robin. Last September, doctors announced the cancer she’d successfully battled several years before had returned and metastasized to her bones. Robin blogs candidly and often about her “pissed-off” response, her search for silver linings in those dark clouds and how music plays a role in her spiritual and medical “maintenance.”
“I figure, why not [be public]?” she says. “It takes some of the charge off the ‘cancer’ word. Also, I think I can be an example … life definitely goes on, and they’re treating my particular kind of cancer as a kind of chronic disease and maintaining it at a level that is not really invasive. They’ve come up with drugs that are so amazing, now I can go in and get treated once a month and keep it contained and maintained for as along as possible. Women are living 10 years with this. So that’s where I’m at with it.”
The diagnosis devastated Robin, who had transformed her previous cancer experience into a creative and personal growth opportunity by jettisoning a newly purchased house and other entanglements, and more fully committing herself to what she loves most: playing music.
“I’m just now feeling like I’m getting some steam back, because [treatment’s] working really well,” she says. She’s embracing her lifelong love of art, designing items for sale through online merch market Café Press, with proceeds hopefully benefiting Wellness Community. She’s also making plans to perform in France — a long-cherished dream — and “enjoying learning other people’s music” for a change, whether she’s reconnecting with favorite Beatles tunes or deconstructing standards like “Come Rain Or Come Shine.”
“There’s so much beautiful music out there. I feel like I’m finally old enough to take on a James Taylor song [laughs]. That sounds weird, but taking on a song like ‘Fire and Rain’ — I needed all this time to grow into it.”
In performance she mixes personalized covers with her own “folkyjazzy” music, whose intimate vibe and sophisticated chord voicings place her somewhere between Patricia Barber’s spare, dusky jazz and “Hejira” — and “Hissing of Summer Lawns” — era Joni Mitchell. She just started a weekly residency at Descanso Gardens, where it’s open and cool. So she leaves the M&Ms at home.
Robin performs at Descanso Gardens, 1418 Descanso Drive, La Cañada Flintridge, 5:30-7 p.m. Thursdays through Aug. 28. For details, call (818) 949-4200. www.myspace.com/folkjazz.
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