Every jazz singer has a story. Cheryl Jones, who appears every Sunday at the District’s Utopia Bar & Grill, is no exception. “I always said my vocation was ministry and my avocation was music,” said the 51-year old.
And so it was — in the beginning.
| Onstage |
| Cheryl Jones Trio |
| Where: Utopia Bar & Grill, 1418 U St. NW |
| When: Sundays from 9:30 p.m. to 1:30 a.m. |
| Admission: Free, 202-483-7669, utopiaindc.com |
Jones remembers music becoming an integral part of her life at 8, when she began her study of classical piano in her hometown of Houston. She went on to the University of Kansas where she earned a degree in music therapy. A mandatory six-month internship in Galveston, Texas, was barely completed when she decided to pursue a career in institutional ministry. Ordained in 1988, Cheryl Jones graduated with a master of divinity degree in pastoral care and counseling from the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.
Her two loves, music and ministry, would merge in 1989 when she accepted a job in Washington as a chaplain at Howard University, a post she held until 1995. In the meantime, she performed at night with a local group, the Oasis Vocal Octet and, after leaving Howard, worked by day in a variety of settings as an institutional chaplain.
“Music started taking over in 2001,” Jones recalled. “I learned solo vocal jazz at the Ellington music school [in D.C.] and fell in love with the workshops there. In 2005, I recorded my first CD, ‘Like Someone in Love.'”
Today, Jones is a music teacher at Washington’s Elsie Whitlow Stokes Charter School and at night, the jazz diva in her takes over as she belts out songs and croons ballads at her standing gig every Sunday at Utopia. Jones, along with Wayne Wilentz at the piano and Jim West on drums, perform jazz standards as well as the jazz-infused R&B songs of Stevie Wonder, Al Jarreau, Michael Jackson, Aretha Franklin and Chaka Khan.
“We also do a few Brazilian tunes, mostly from [composer] Antonio Carlos Jobim,” Jones noted. “I’ve always been a lover of all kinds of music and I’ll sing anything.”
Heavily influenced by her idols, Shirley Horn, Sarah Vaughan, Carmen McRae and Ella Fitzgerald, Jones instinctively knows that the chaplain in her is still at work through the healing powers of song.
“Folks can come in and feel catered to with the music,” she said. “We develop relationships and they know that we care about them.”
