Finding her voice: How a Wellington woman overcame shyness, illness to bring jazz to the world
Yvette Norwood-Tiger was 40 years old the first time she sang in front of a crowd. The Michigan native was raised in a family of church musicians, but shyness kept her from sharing her voice with others.
Now, at 59, Norwood-Tiger has produced four jazz albums, performed in venues across the world and is the founder of the Palm Beach County International Jazz Festival.
Last year, the Cultural Council for Palm Beach County awarded Norwood-Tiger an Innovation Artist Fellowship that paid for her latest record, “Autumn Sun,” a tribute to bebop with her lyrics over instrumental pieces by saxophonists Dexter Gordon, Charlie Parker and Miles Davis.
“It just made the impossible more possible,” said Norwood-Tiger, who in 2010 moved to Wellington from New Jersey. "A lot of bebop tunes don't have lyrics to them. I wanted to give a voice to that genre of music."
Norwood-Tiger believes in second chances. She gained the courage to sing in public long past the age when people stop thinking about performing; she found ways to create her own gigs after struggling to be booked; and she recovered from a brain tumor.
“When you get a second chance, you do what you love," Norwood-Tiger said. "I'm still here. For me, to enjoy life is to do my music."
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Jazz singer grew up with gospel music in Motown
Yvette Norwood grew up surrounded by music in Detroit, the home of Motown.
At home, her family always kept a gospel record spinning. At church, her mother played the drums, her dad the guitar and her five older sisters were part of the choir. But not Yvette.
“They never heard me sing,” Norwood-Tiger said. “I was too shy.”
The Norwoods worshipped at the International Gospel Center, known to produce famous musicians such as Vicky Winans and Tim Bowman, who Yvette's father taught to play guitar. Yvette’s mother was a friend of the late Dennis Edwards, a singer for The Temptations.
As a child, Norwood-Tiger said she used to vocalize around the house, but one day her sister’s friend heard her singing over the phone.
"Tell her to be quiet,” she said. “She can't sing.”
That day, Norwood-Tiger promised never to sing anywhere someone might hear her. Only her dogs and her best friend, Brenda, knew that she could fine-tune her voice to gospel, traditional jazz and even songs by the Jackson 5.
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A radio station introduced her ears to jazz. Her heart quickly followed
She fell in love with jazz at a young age.
“The improvisations of it,” Norwood-Tiger said. “You can listen to the same song, and it'll sound different the next time, depending on who's singing it or who's performing it.”
Growing up, she loved the comedian Jerry Lewis, the dancer Fred Astaire and the Count Basie Orchestra. She was always tuned in to WJZZ, a radio station still broadcasting in Detroit, where she heard different styles of jazz for the first time: smooth, traditional, Latin and the Great American songbook.
Her parents played strictly gospel but, as soon as they would walk out of the house, her sisters switched to a Motown record to sing "Just My Imagination” by The Temptations.
She idolized Mahalia Jackson, James Cleveland and Aretha Franklin, but her favorite vocalist of all time is Ella Fitzgerald.
“I love the elegance of that era,” Norwood-Tiger said. Of Fitzgerald, she added: “Anytime I've seen her performing in films, she would be dressed elegantly, with long gowns, and her hair well puffed and it was just the elegant, innocent time of music."
Still, Norwood's love of music remained in listening.
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What a cruise! Finding love and then her voice
Norwood-Tiger went on to get an associate's degree, became a clerk typist and worked as a mechanical engineer technician for the U.S. Army. She landed a job at a chemical company in Nashville, but eventually found her way back to Michigan.
At 34, Norwood-Tiger and her friend Brenda decided to take a cruise. One night Brenda went to sleep and Norwood-Tiger went to find the music reverberating from the boat’s nightclub.
She sat in the bar and a polite stranger in a black suit, Steve Tiger, asked her to dance. They talked and twirled all night and the next day, she met his family.
A month later, Tiger asked her to marry him.
Norwood-Tiger first said no; she wanted to wait. But shortly afterward, she moved to New Jersey where Steve and his 13-year-old son lived. They married two years later in 2001.
Soon, Steve and his son started to hear her sing and hum around the house.
On Friday nights, Norwood-Tiger would go to El Lobo Negro, an art gallery in New Jersey near Asbury Park that hosted a different jazz band every week. Near the end, an improvised jam session would cap the night.
“I would just watch like, 'Oh my God,” Norwood-Tiger said. “I'm sitting here and I would imagine myself up there on the stage singing.”
Steve could see both her desire to sing and her fear of doing it. On their following cruise, he dragged her to the karaoke bar and convinced her to take the microphone.
“Nobody knows me here,” she thought. Bolstered by anonymity, they began frequenting karaoke on every cruise.
When Norwood-Tiger was 39, the couple was sitting at the piano bar when one of Steve's friends volunteered her to sing with the pianist.
She was tense and hid in her seat, refusing to stand in front of a crowded room. Then, the pianist began playing, “I Will Always Love You,” by Whitney Houston and called her onstage.
“I made the piano player move over so I could sit down on the bench because I was too shy to stand up and sing,” Norwood-Tiger said. “And I started singing the song and the crowd went wild.”
“I was in a trance,” she added. "It was the first time I had ever felt that energy.”
Norwood-Tiger's year of firsts: First lessons, first gigs, first scat singing
Back at home, Norwood-Tiger went on with her life working now as an interior designer, but her desire to sing kept growing. She enrolled in her first music theory lessons with Jeff Levine, who also plays piano and organ.
Levine taught her to read music, how to prepare for songs and how to sing with live musicians. Norman-Tiger was familiar with the lyrics and melodies of jazz standards, but her biggest challenge was scatting, or using the voice to express a song's melody with sounds instead of words — a skill for which her idol Ella Fitzgerald was renowned.
“It’s like taking your voice and using it as an instrument,” Norwood-Tiger said. “ And mimicking a horn player, a trumpet or saxophone.”
After a year, she booked her first gig at Lobo Negro in 2005. She was 41 years old, and her friend Brenda flew in from Detroit to watch her perform.
"Oh man, I was so afraid,” Yvette said. “It was amazing. But the shyness was always there. Fear was always there."
Four years later, she released her first album, "whY noT: Love, peace, joy, love."
A health scare silenced her for two years. Would she sing again?
The couple moved to Wellington in 2010. Two years later, doctors found a tumor in Norwood-Tiger’s brain. It was shaped like a hand and was pressing against the carotid artery, the pituitary gland and her optic nerves.
She underwent surgery and then radiation, but part of the tumor remained. Doctors said they could not remove the rest without causing brain damage and told Norwood-Tiger she wouldn't live much longer.
She stopped singing. Her throat was weak; her voice had changed. Her hearing became hypersensitive — she couldn't bear listening to music in church. She resorted to prayer.
After two years, the tumor was still lodged in her brain but it didn't seem to be growing and Norwood-Tiger started to sing again.
“Now, how I approach my music is to just give everything to God, the applause and the criticism,” Norwood-Tiger said. "Once I recovered, I wanted to perform in concert halls.”
Since then, Norwood-Tiger has included in every show “A Song for My Father,” composed by the jazz pianist Horace Silver in 1965.For through my mind and soulMy heart will always holdA special place for himIt's true
Palm Beach County venues launch Yvette Norwood-Tiger as a jazz singer
Her first post-recovery gig was at Rudy’s Pub in Lake Worth Beach. Next, a local restauranteur in West Palm Beach's Northwood neighborhood hired her for weekly performances with the band Eric & the Jazzers.
Soon she was singing in venues across South Florida, including the Arts Garage in Delray Beach, the Double Roads Tavern in Jupiter and the Kravis Center in West Palm Beach. She later sang in Michigan, Maryland and New York City, including performances in the Cotton Club in Harlem and Birdland in Hell's Kitchen.
In 2019, Norwood-Tiger released a second album “LOVE IS,” that stayed on Jazzweek's charts for over 16 weeks.
She wanted to travel the world with her music but didn't have an agent. So, she became her own agent, contacting venues on every continent asking to rent any space available.
The Royal Albert Hall in London told her she couldn't afford to rent their theater but they wanted to hire her for a presentation. She would perform her third album “A'la Ella,” a tribute to Fitzgerald. When she arrived in London to practice, a photo of The First Lady of Song was in the back of the stage.
"It was like she was looking over me,” said Norwood-Tiger, who returned to sing at The Royal Albert Hall for three years in a row and went on to perform in Brussels, Berlin, Italy, South Africa, Argentina and the Caribbean.
She has sat in with late saxophonist David "Fathead" Newman, guitarist Bucky Pizzarelli, members of Celine Dion's family, including live duets with Claudette Dion, and Jay Beckenstein and Tom Schuman of the band Spyro Gyra.
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Finding no jobs at jazz festivals, she starts one of her own at the Kravis
Norwood-Tiger said she wanted to start her own jazz festival based in South Florida to perform and feature local and international artists. Multiple musicians and even organizers told her that an indoor festival would be complicated to organize.
"I couldn't get hired at a jazz festival. So I started my own,” Norwood-Tiger said. “No one I could get to say that that's a great idea, but I went with it, anyway."
The first Palm Beach International Jazz Festival at Kravis Center was held in 2019, the event riding on Norwood-Tiger's credit card. She rented the theater’s 285-seat Rinker Playhouse and waited to sell enough tickets.
The festival was a daylong event with three bands playing in the afternoon and three others playing in the evening. It featured performances by Avery Sommers, a recent appointee to The Society for Preservation of The Great American Songbook, the Cuban pianist Marlow Rosado and the bandleader Tito Puente Jr.
Then COVID-19 changed everything.
The Kravis reduced the theater's seating by half, and there had to be fewer groups playing and the bands that did play had to cut their number of members playing. Still, Norwood-Tiger rented the venue each year and last spring, the festival celebrated its fifth anniversary.
"I felt humbled,” she said. "I hope it grows and grows in funding so I can continue to bring more artists and add more days.”
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A jazz singer's ultimate challenge: Putting bebop melodies into words
In 2022, Norwood-Tiger landed a fellowship from the Arts Council of Palm Beach County to produce an album pairing her original lyrics with classic bebop songs.
Bebop is a subgenre of jazz that emerged in the 1940s after the first big bands and the Great American songbook era. At the time, many of the musicians were drafted to serve in World War II and the bands broke down into trios, quartets and quintets.
Unlike traditional jazz, Norwood-Tiger said, bebop is instrumental instead of vocal, but improvisation is still a key component.
"Improvising is when a musician will take the melody of the song, they'll play it through and around the second time they'll change it up and personalize it for themselves,” she said. "Sort of like scatting."
Norwood-Tiger, however, was a vocalist, not a composer. She set out to write the lyrics to songs by the forefathers of bebop, including Thelonious Monk, Gordon, Davis and Parker.
Some lyrics evolved from her research into each composer, she said. "Then, there are other songs that came to me in dreams.”
The album and its presentations helped shine a light on her musical career at a local level, said Jessica Ransom, the director of artist services for the Cultural Council for Palm Beach County.
"This was completely different to what she had previously done," Ransom said. "She's a singer, not a songwriter, so for her it was a challenge and she rose to the challenge, for sure."
"Yvette is a world-traveled singer that lives in our community. Our mission is to promote the work of local artists and tell the public how they can support them,” Ronsom added.
After a year, Norwood-Tiger released last June the six-track CD “Autumn Sun.”
Songs from the album were played from a vintage telephone at the Cultural Council's facility in Lake Worth Beach where Norwood-Tiger also performed the new record to a room packed with people.
“I feel blessed," she said. “It made me feel like I'm in the right place, at the right time."
Almost 20 years after her first gig, Norwood-Tiger is now thrilled to sing for a crowd.
"It used to be the less people the better," she said. "Now, the bigger the audience, the more energy I feel."
Valentina Palm covers Royal Palm Beach, Wellington, Loxahatchee and other western communities in Palm Beach County for The Palm Beach Post. Email her at [email protected] and follow her on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, at @ValenPalmB. Support local journalism: Subscribe today.
This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Once too shy to sing, Yvette Norwood-Tiger commands stage as jazz artist