Sutu Forté knows that an airplane resonates like an F sharp as it careens across the sky. To Sutu, notes are colors, and on the street her attire would be “Rhapsody in Blue.” The way she tells a story is like listening to a jazz tune — explosive crescendos intertwined with abundant note changes, rhythm variations and staccato facial expressions that make each installment theatric. Even the way her own name spills out of her mouth makes you believe she’s talking about someone famous.
Sutu is the show. Musicians abound, and individual compositions are welcomed at her new Missouri Theatre program, Moulin Musique. She’s adamant about entertaining and is sprouting a group of revolutionary artists to carry the torch. That there’s sometimes an audience around to catch them having fun doesn’t change the notion that it’s all about the music.
Sutu passionately wants to bring the music to her audience. In Moulin Musique she’s brought them on stage for live jazz sessions on an intimate cabaret-style show. Sixty chairs squeeze in between the curtains and music stands while musicians teeter on the edge of the stage. Oct. 22 is the second of the audience-inclusive four-part series.
“People listen,” Sutu says. “They are there to listen. Not to talk; not to eat; not to pick up people. The reason you’re there is to just extract all the juice from the performer. The performer wants you to have their juice. It’s just like this reciprocal thing.”
At times she fills the room with arms flailing and copper hair flying. Sometimes the gooey, sticky persona of thick, heavy jazz seizes her body, and her shoulders drop back, her arm drapes over the back of the chair. A gaze full of secrets crosses the room as she glances at her piano’s steady position in the house. Her voice slides down through the remnants of her smoking career. Without delay, the shriek of excitement comes back.
Her mother sat belly up to the piano while she was pregnant with Sutu. At 2 and a half, any composition Sutu played was appreciated by her mother, whom Sutu describes as a frustrated pianist. Sutu grew up taking lessons and graduated from Stephens College in 1974. She went to New York for her Master of Music at Juilliard, convinced a life of concert piano was her future. One problem: She felt too close to the audience to play so far away from them.
“I have tried my whole life to wash out or subdue the stripes in this tigress, and it always backfires,” Sutu says. “I envy people who can become beautiful, who can blend with the ambiance.”
Now she plays with anybody, any age, any instrument. Moulin Musique, a cabaret-like gathering, allows local talent to share original compositions and collaborate on an improvised finale. For Sutu, it’s a chance to host an uninterrupted night of music.
“What I would give for that audience that’s sitting and listening,” Sutu says, “and I don’t have to compete with the espresso maker and the waitress and the counting your change and the blah-blah-b-b-blah.”
David White, director of the Missouri Theatre, works with Sutu on Moulin Musique. “It’s exciting to have an artist who is willing to not use the 1,200-seat element, but who hungers to have a more one-on-one opportunity with the audience,” he says.
The idea settled a concern that David and Sutu had with the scene in Columbia.
“There is no performing opportunity here for people who want to give concerts,” Sutu says. “All there is are restaurants and bars, unless you’re some huge muckamuck who can fill Jesse Auditorium.”
Spend a night on stage but be warned: You might need more Sutu.
— Hayley Irlbeck, 10/16/2003
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