ASIA LIKES Patti Austin, and the feeling is clearly mutual. 'It always gives me a great feeling when I perform in a concert and my audience sings along with my songs,' she says - which happens during her regular tours of Asian countries.
Hong Kong audiences have a reputation for being buttoned up, but even during her concert on May 16 she might find herself with supplementary backing vocals on such popular favourites (if she sings them) as The Heat of Heat, Every Home Should Have One and her hit duet with James Ingram, Baby Come to Me, which gained even wider exposure as the theme to General Hospital.
What's certain, unfortunately, is that those contributions won't be in the league of Austin's harmony vocals. She paid her dues as a highly rated session singer and her backups were solicited by such studio perfectionists as Paul Simon, Steely Dan and her godfather, Quincy Jones, who calls her 'the daughter I don't remember asking for'.
Jones is one of a number of famous figures in popular music to have helped advance Austin's career. Dinah Washington stood next to Jones at her christening, and discharged one of her duties as godmother by bringing the young Austin onstage at the Apollo Theatre at the age of three to sing a duet.
As a teenager, Austin appeared on the Sammy Davis Jnr Show, and then in the 1970s began to emerge as a session singer and a jazz artist in her own right. Her first real taste of commercial success, however, came with her godfather in 1980. She sang lead on The Dude, and signed to Jones' Qwest label. Jones was at that time the world's hottest producer as a result of his work with Michael Jackson - he drafted Austin in to sing the duet It's the Falling in Love with Jackson on Off the Wall.
Jones also oversaw Every Home Should Have One, pushing Austin in a schmaltzy direction that probably hit its height - or depth, depending on how you look at it - with another duet with Ingram, How Do You Keep the Music Playing? That tune, recorded for a Goldie Hawn film called Best Friends, was nominated for an Oscar, but was nevertheless symptomatic of a problem she shared with other great singers such as Aretha Franklin. Her voice was so strong that producers had fallen into the habit of depending on it to make something of run-of-the mill songs, rather than finding material worthy of her talent.
Looking for a way out of the impasse, Austin increasingly turned to the standards songbook, and, accordingly, back towards jazz. It's her jazz credentials that prompted the Hong Kong Leisure and Cultural Services Department to include her in this year's Jazz Up lineup, and in particular her 2002 album For Ella, one of the most critically acclaimed of a number of tribute albums to the late Ella Fitzgerald.