A Visit with Patty Stephens

This was published in the New Mexico Breeze on June 12, 2009.

A Visit with Patty Stephens

By Joan Saks Berman

On Friday, June 12 and Saturday, June 13, the New Mexico Jazz Workshop will present the annual Women's Voices concerts. Women's Voices, a festival which began in 1993, continues as an annual tribute to the outstanding women vocalists in New Mexico. The concerts are at the Albuquerque Museum Amphitheater. One of the performers on both days is Patty Stephens. She's been part of the festival for 6 or 7 years.

I interviewed Patty Stephens in her home in the North Valley, near Los Duranes School. She had just returned from the High Desert Center for Spiritual Living (formerly High Desert Church of Religious Science), church on the West Side where she is music director and sings with the gospel choir on Sundays. She's been a member there for 27 years. She said that she likes the church because it honors diversity and works to make the world a place worth living in. In her role there, she tries to unite and develop the community.

As we sat at the kitchen table sipping iced tea, I looked around admiring the eclectic décor and her collection of interesting odds and ends filling the built-in hutch on one wall. Outside the back door was a garden of corn and four kinds of squash, and a hammock strung between two old cottonwoods.

Patty Stephens was born into singing. Her mother was a musician and a dancer. It was a large family, eight girls and three boys, and there was always singing into the home. Patty never took lessons; she must have inherited her beautiful voice. Some families talk about having enough members to form a baseball team. Patty said that in her family, there were always enough to create a play, and they put on a series based on Greek tragedies.

The family lived as a lay family at the Holy Cross Abbey in Cañon City, Colorado. She recalled that her first stage performance was around three years old and it revolved around Catholic ritual.

In high school, Patty sang in the choir and joined a rock and roll band. Later, she toured with the Abbey Glee Club. She had a group named Double Entendre with her sister Teresa, singing jazz, blues and country music as they toured around Colorado. In her late teens and early 20's she worked as a farm worker, and learned mariachi music from her Mexican co-workers. In the early '70's she lived in Cuernavaca, Mexico, teaching theater and learning Spanish.

In 1985, Patty moved to Albuquerque with her husband and her son Gabriel, determined to devote her time to nothing but music and theater. Only one of her sisters, Wendy Fabian, an artist, lives here. Patty broke into the local scene by singing in jams at El Madrid when that bar was a center of local music. Then she found the First Church of Religious Science (now called the
Albuquerque Center for Spiritual Living, located on Louisiana). She started singing at services every Sunday, and began to meet other musicians and make connections for getting jobs, such as singing in the lounge at the Hyatt Hotel. She has sung in such places as Café Miche and at the Mykonos Restaurant.

Admiring her voice, aspiring singers started asking Patty to give them singing lessons. She had to figure out how to teach, since she had never taken lessons herself. Now, teaching is her greatest passion. It's fulfilling on a deeper level than performing. The singing lessons she gives become a means of personal empowerment for her students. Working with the breath often leads to an unexpected release of trauma.

Patty teaches private lessons and also through the education program of the New Mexico Jazz Workshop. She is especially enthusiastic about her work with Music Together®, a research-based international program for families, designed to enhance children's acquisition of basic musical competence, based on the belief that all children are musical. It's not about performing but about integrating movement and music into family activity, and is aimed at children from birth to six years old. The FamJam events bring the community in.

Patty's current work includes the Brazil Project, with pianist Bert Dalton, percussionist Frank Leto, drummer John Bartlit, and Milo Jaramillo on bass. She feels more rapport with this group than she has with other bands. She's learning Portuguese for the songs. Upcoming performances for the group include Zinc on June 20. They will be at the New Mexico Jazz Festival at 6:40pm on July 18, in an auxiliary tent near Civic Plaza. Later that evening, at 8p.m. they will be at Seasons upstairs deck.

In her "free" time, Patty loves to garden and cook. Her friends are fellow singers, who often gather to sing mariachi songs together in her backyard.

Patty's website is under construction, but you can find out more about Music Together® at www.famjam.net.