PORT ANGELES — When professor Elaine Gardner-Morales formed a vocal jazz group earlier this year, the singers showed up, with gusto. Turnout was good for her first class last spring, and when the Peninsula College Vocal Jazz Ensemble gave its first concert, it filled the campus’ Maier Performance Hall to capacity.
Now Gardner-Morales is teaching two sections and 22 Peninsula College students the fine art of jazz. At the beginning of this quarter, the veteran music teacher noticed one young woman. Jessie Lee-Davis Spicher, not yet 30 years old, knocked her professor out with her voice, and with her own kind of grace.
“Jessie is one of my more talented singers I have had here,” Gardner-Morales said, adding that Spicher has style as a soloist, but also “works hard . . . to make the overall group sound good.”
She is “a real musical leader,” the professor said of her student.
Gardner-Morales, Spicher and her fellow singers are preparing to join the Olympic Express Big Band for an unprecedented event this Thursday night: Jingle Jazz, a concert of holiday music and swing tunes, from “Cool Yule” and “Sleigh Ride” to “Choo Choo Ch’Boogie” and “In the Mood.” The 16-piece band and the men and women of the Vocal Jazz Ensemble will take the Peninsula College Little Theater stage at 7:30 p.m. Thursday.
Spicher has a couple of solos, one a holiday song and the other a jazz classic: “Santa Baby” and Louis Prima’s “Jump, Jive an’ Wail.” She auditioned for these numbers, and is filled with anticipation for the moment when she’ll step onto the stage with Olympic Express.
Spicher recently returned to college after a hiatus. She’s also a new mother; she and her husband Dan welcomed their first child, Lucius, in May. They’re expecting another baby next April.
This is a joy-filled time for Spicher and her family — and it comes after a series of trials.
In June 2011, Dan was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma and spent much of the year undergoing chemotherapy. He had just landed a job at Westport Shipyard before beginning treatments, and had to quit work.
His wife continued to run her business, Maid to Perfection, while caring for Dan. A group of friends, Angels for Dan, formed to raise money to help the couple with medical expenses.
By Christmas 2011, Dan’s cancer was in remission; he continues to enjoy good health today.
Four months later in March 2012, it was Jessie’s turn to face a major health problem. She had to have surgery for a chiari malformation, a brain condition that gave her vicious headaches. The surgery, she reported in a recent interview, was a success.
Through all of this, Jessie Spicher didn’t have immediate family to turn to. Her mother died in 2000, when Spicher was 14; later that same year, her father, Clallam County Sheriff’s Deputy Wally Davis, was shot and killed in the line of duty.
Through it all, Spicher has kept music in her life. While a student at Port Angeles High School, she sang in the Symphonic Choir and in Vocal Unlimited choir, both of which are led by Jolene Dalton Gailey.
As a teenager, Spicher was “marvelous,” Gailey recalled.
“She was very dedicated,” made the All-Northwest Choir and went to the state competition as a soloist.
“I am so happy that Jessie is still singing,” added Gailey, “and bringing joy.”
After high school, Spicher studied music at Central Washington University. But she has learned to sing, she feels, mostly by doing it.
As a worship leader at The Crossing Church, the Christian congregation that meets at 10 a.m. Sundays inside the Deer Park Cinema, Spicher seeks to inspire others to lift their voices.
“I have a passion for singing,” she said. “I have a passion for being in a group setting.”
Christian songs, with their lyrics projected onto the movie screen at The Crossing, are about “focusing your heart to worship,” Spicher said.
They’re easier to sing than the music she’s studying in college.
Jazz is “very, very technical in rhythm and melody,” and her professor is one exacting teacher. Gardner-Morales “is a get-down-to-brass-tacks kind of person. She wants it done right,” said Spicher.
When they’re not yet getting it right, the professor lets her students know — yet she does it with love, the singer added.
Gardner-Morales believes that vocal jazz music, coupled with the group setting, fulfills a need in young people. At Peninsula College, she finds her students are eager to be challenged musically.
Spicher, for her part, would like to record her own music one day. That takes money, of course, and she has other priorities right now. She doesn’t know where her singing will take her; she just knows she wants to keep making music.
“Singing,” she said, “makes me feel whole.”
