Coming this time on Art rocks, a Louisiana songbird who's taking jazz and the blues to the world.

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They never let it go.

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These stories up next on Art rocks.

West Baton Rouge Museum is proud to provide local support for this program on LPB, offering diverse exhibitions throughout the year and programs that showcase art, history, music, and more.

West Baton Rouge Museum culture cultivated Art rocks is made possible by the Foundation for Excellence in Louisiana Public Broadcasting and by viewers like you.

Hello.

Thank you for joining us for Art rocks with me.

James Fox Smith from Country Roads magazine, vocal stylist Coco York has made a name for herself from New Orleans to North Louisiana.

Nowadays, though, York is developing a passionate base of support in other parts of the world, two fans say not only does Coco appear to deeply feel what she's singing.

They feel it too.

LPB producer Dorothy Kendrick had a chance to speak with Coco during a recent visit to the beaten Harn Museum and Gardens in Monroe, Louisiana.

Let's listen in.

I understand you started performing music at a very young age.

I started playing piano when I was about four, taking lessons.

You went on to play for your church?

I did.

I played for my church until I finished high school.

Then went away to college on a dare.

I was originally going to audition in piano, and somebody dared me to do all of in a voice.

So I did, and they accepted me.

I was following my.

Truth by my window.

Wasn't me.

Afraid.

To.

Play the fool you.

Oh, it's so close.

And I figured that they would accept me.

If I had been playing for one.

But I hadn't been singing all the time that I was playing for church.

I wasn't really singing.

I was just playing for them.

Or, you know, teaching them how to sing song or that kind of thing, or teaching teaching parts.

I guess I had the talent.

I didn't know that I had the talent, plus I had been doing other things.

But then as time walked on, my talent developed and I decided that I wanted to be an opera singer.

Our director had invited an opera singer to come and do a concert there, and she happened to have been made a Jackson UNT, but she had been living in Europe for years and years and years.

She was this little petite lady, very beautiful, this very tiny.

She had this voice that was just so mesmerizing.

She was a character.

Which means that she could go extremely high a little bit, like right now.

She had those kind of things.

Like, I had never heard anything like that ever.

Meat loaf.

Stay dish.

Oh, my God, I'm not.

I'm not the one for what?

Not.

Darling, I heard you sing to me my food.

I thought, oh, I'm so good.

For a long time it was right on the phone.

I went to my director, who happened to have been my voice teacher, and I asked him what would be the possibility of me studying with this.

He said, well, I don't know, you know.

So he's he's let me check into it.

He did.

He said he came back with the report that you said it was okay to work with you, and he said she's a friend of mine.

I will set that up for you.

She was living in Baton Rouge.

She was living in Europe.

She was going to be an artist in residence at the University of Texas for that year.

When I got there, I realized that I should have registered before in order to get in school to study with her.

But I didn't register, thinking, okay, mama was on me studying with her, not the whole school thing, she told me.

She said, well, because you're not registered in school.

Only thing I can do is I can give you private lessons.

But I have to audition you.

I can only promise nothing.

She said if you do not, I'll take you to the student.

If you're not, then I won't take you.

And she accepted me.

And we set a price for the lesson and so forth.

And I ended up not having paid for.

Not one lesson, simply because I had a class she didn't.

And every time she needed something on my days of my lessons, I would say, let me drive you home.

If you need anything, you need me to go to the grocery store for you.

You need me to take your lunch to close to the laundry.

Da da da da da da da da da.

And she.

Would you like little house parties?

And so I said, why, if you let me come and that, you know, after drinks.

And I'll clean up the kitchen and I'll clean up that it was done.

So by me doing all of these things, she never charged me.

That was my journey with Mathilda.

And when she left Austin and she went to teach to Spelman, I left them also once Atlanta continued studying with her.

And then I married a jazz musician and everything with left turned and my talent was developing.

The president of Houston Tillis in college at that time came to one of the students recitals.

He asked me, would I like to travel with him?

The thing before his speeches, he was one of the first black generals.

Well, sure.

Of course.

So I got a chance to get some exposure singing I got a chance to really sort of be heard and more development with stage presence and that kind of thing.

As I said, I met and married a jazz musician, and so.

And his father was Tiny York, who gave Ray Charles one of his first gigs.

So he was also from a musical family.

He worked at the Fairmont Hotel in New Orleans.

Under the bill, he was, public orchestra.

I would go to their the and listen to them in that hotel brought in people like Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, Sarah Vaughan.

So I got a chance to listen to the best of the best of the best.

I had to unlearn so many things in order to be able to make a good sound.

You know, music is sound.

So in order to just make a good sound with everything not being who you know, so, but making even if it is that make it sound like something, you know, make put some feeling in it.

Make stripped out some of those tones where they glide rather than just just have that frequency, that waveform happening right.

Listening to them interpret songs, interpret their feeling and their emotions mixed with this music was so completely different than opera, of course, because here you had a chance to place yourself in the lyric of the song, and from your experience and interpret it from your experience and opera, that's a little different because everything is scored out with jazz, blues, pop, you all the story, everything around.

Unchained my whole face and let me go.

Unchain my heart.

Break.

You don't love me.

No, no.

Everytime I call you on the phone.

Somebody telling me that you're not at home I'll take my heart, set me free.

My first gig had been learning songs with him.

Your husband?

And I had walked in on Bourbon Street at the Absinthe Bar, going around listening to different singers and so forth, and I became very bold with.

I asked one of the musicians, asked, can I sit in his is sure.

And I said, okay, this is what you want to sing.

The blues is still on me Monday and a few other blues and, I ended up with the gig that night.

They fired her and hired me and I'm like, oh, that's not a good way to go to be.

But I felt great.

Then I had a chance to perform that.

That was the whole objective.

The instrumentation was this your husband is someone else.

So this is a whole different band with Larry Siebert, very popular in New Orleans because Sebastian, who teaches at one of the music schools, they're all such fierce musicians.

Johnny puts up with all these guys, the big top notch guys.

Who were we all in our 20s during that time?

How long did you stay at this particular club?

And then you move on and then you get to the point where you're going overseas and stuff.

How did that work out?

That happened in that, with that band around the same time?

I've been working with them, I guess probably maybe like six months or so.

I'm gonna find what I have left in.

With you.

I do love to.

With you all the new day myself.

I love.

With you.

I can learn to.

Whip you on an all day.

But you who who can attend to.

Oh, who have untied the two.

Who you to turn.

Oh, well, I like a way.

You convention people came into the club and a lady walked up to me and she said, Australian lady.

And she.

She said, that I talk to you.

And so many people walk up, so many people want to talk to you.

So many people always having something to say.

Want it, want to spend some time, but I want you to do some time with them.

So I was like, oh yeah, okay, sure.

Then, but I said, you have to wait until after the the gig is over.

That's the thing that I'm thinking, okay, she's going to be long gone.

Nobody's going to wait.

Because we were doing six sets and our sets were like an hour, and then we'd take the half an hour break, you know?

So I was like, she's going to be long gone.

But she waited and she said, okay, I really do want to talk to you.

And she said, you know, you should come to Australia.

I'm very flippant.

And I'm like, Will you set it up without, how many people are going to come up to you completely stranger and remap your entire life?

Okay.

And she was lonely there for a couple of days, and the next day that I had a car, I wouldn't got her picture from the hotel.

And I said, well, let me just take you.

So you New Orleans, you know, so we had a chance to spend the day together and so forth before during that time there was no email and digital anything.

And so we we wrote letters back and forth, you know, and, at this point, I had a baby.

So it was like, I have to try to make this work here and so forth.

But she little bit my look that she gave me these Australian stories and so forth.

It was like, well, you know, this, this, that's that idea became a real good idea.

And all of a sudden the baby sitter father was there with me and we were just chatting and so forth, and, phone rang.

I picked up the phone and he said, hi, this is Sandy.

This.

Are you seriously, would you really consider coming to Australia?

They flip it a twist and go, yeah, yeah.

You look, I'm.

I'm thinking none of this is going to happen.

I just got roll with it.

And, a few minutes later, she said, she called back and she said, well, if you were to come, how long would it take you to not give any?

That's all Obama and I waited a few minutes later and she called back and she said, well, there'll be a ticket.

Been waiting for you at New Orleans airport.

What?

What is going on with your husband?

My husband and I were separated.

Yeah.

This gave you freedom?

Yeah, it it gave me fear.

But it also blew my mind.

This door being opened for me.

And I didn't do anything to open it, per se.

Plus, I have a kid to think about, and he was like, two years old or something, so that's huge.

I talked to my mom about it and she said, she would help me with the baby.

And so we devised a plan that I would go.

I flew over to Australia, and she could have been anybody.

She was so, so nice.

This whole world was 180.

Everything is on the left side.

You drive on the right side of the car, on the left side of the road.

I love it.

We had a chance to do a lot of gigs.

I worked in the RSL clubs with some of the best musicians there.

Nobody can do the blues there like me.

That's that was one of the only African-Americans that worked in the country who could do the blues like me.

What was the money like compared to what you're making here?

Well, here in New Orleans at that time, it would make a $50.

Each musician would get paid at $50.

And then I was getting paid 300 for $500.

And the cost of living there, compared to here I was rooming with that.

So we were splitting the rent.

So the cost of living at that time was probably I mean, don't forget we talked about the South South at that time in probably now generally a lot cheaper to live than other places.

You stay in Sydney for a while, but you spent a lot of time in Holland, which is a big job.

How did that come about?

Somebody just came up and it has to be the question.

You know, they saw me and heard me working at one of the nicest club in Sydney.

Let's call robes.

I and a pianist were working there and somebody walk a period said, hey, we'd like to hire you on a project.

And I'm thinking, Sydney, okay, hi.

Is this going to be in Holland?

And I'm thinking, well, hey, sure, I'll come.

I'll take with the club on to make sure that I could come, that it will about this will allow me the score.

I had been working there.

You had been bringing in the the trousers.

They flew me over to Harlem and I liked it.

Brought my son with me there.

I made dinner and I didn't have to have a bed.

How long did you stay in Holland?

Well, 30.

You?

Where you playing for?

A number of clubs.

Were you at the same club?

I was there for about five years, I guess, before I was hired at the Conservatory and Rotterdam.

And I was also working for the two largest either remit companies.

Never let it go by, by la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la.

Little bit I that the.

Once I started working at the conservatory, I was teaching during the day and then gigging at night that every night, weekends, that kind of thing.

I have heard that Americans kind of go from one genre to another in Europe.

Some of these old styles of music are much more popular.

Give me a little bit of Tennessee whiskey and what people loved about it, and then I'd like to hear that.

And.

You know, this is one of my favorites.

And you do so many tables.

I used to spend my night so in the ballroom.

Liquor was the only light, but no.

But you rescued me from reaching for the bar.

And brought me back from being forced to go.

You with me?

And Tennessee whiskey.

You're a sweet hippie.

A strawberry one.

You're as warm as a brandy, honey.

I say go on, your love.

Oh, but they.

You know what drew you back home?

Well, mama, that's love.

That's it.

And, she was in and out of the house.

Well, then I felt that if I were going to ever spend some quality time with her, that this all vacations, I needed to be with it.

So that was why I moved it.

But again, I didn't quit.

I took a leave of absence, so she got better.

Then I had to go back and, you know.

But then I realized also at that time that quality was better.

Oh, I moved here, I'm here, you know, but in the middle of all of this moving and being here, I've also worked a lot in Asia.

Oh, like six months out of the year and I go back.

It's a lot to go through with a six months out of the year combat.

And, so, yeah, I'm always a little.

Florida based photographer Scott Audette has made a name for himself in many arenas.

His latest is in shooting portraits underwater.

Painstaking thought and planning go into every audit photo session, creating end results that shimmer with vibrancy and inner life.

So focus in on this.

Hey, I'm Scott Odette and I'm an underwater portrait photographer here in Lakeland, Florida.

And this tography is what I've done my entire life.

I was probably in seventh or eighth grade when I picked up a camera, and I had a teacher in middle school who had a dark room and showed me how to process or print my first black and white pictures.

And once the bug hit, that stuck with me my entire life.

So I've worked in primarily pro sports, but also in the news business.

So I've worked for the Reuters news service, the Associated Press news service.

Still do some more for the Tampa Bay rays.

I was with the Tampa Bay lightning for 21 years, and I've kind of covered it, seen it all.

I've been to the Super Bowl, I've been to the World Series, I've been to the Olympics, the name, and I've probably been.

The underwater photography is an evolution of a relationship between me and my father.

He was a firefighter, but he fancied himself as a photographer with other water stuff.

And so really, I picked up a camera, the first underwater, just so that he and I had something in common to do, and then realized not too long into it that I really wanted to do more with it and explore further in the field and in general.

Underwater photography gives me the opportunity to create something that's not necessarily part of my everyday life as a sports photographer.

This allows me to go back to when I was a 1314 year old kid and first picked up a camera, right?

That's where the excitement is.

That's where the magic is, and the passion is creating something that you're thinking about in your head and then taking it and putting it down on a piece of film.

Now we're putting it in a digital file.

So that's what drives me to do this.

It's not as easy as it looks, because you've got a combination of artistic skill and technical skill that he's combining to create finished images that give him the product that he wants to have.

I do the sets, I bring all the clothes, I pick out all the fabrics like the makeup that coral is wearing.

Today, I picked out the makeup that I wanted to wear.

I helped her design the headpiece like, that's part of the creative process.

It's not just what happens in the water.

95% of what I do happens on land before we ever touch the water.

My pool in the backyard is the ideal location for this.

We keep it 90 degrees year round.

What we do on the water is it like shooting a portrait above water?

Like a lot of stuff has to be adapted and even sometimes created.

So we're using Canon series dSLR.

So the downside to underwater photography is kind of the cost of entry.

The housings that you put these cameras in typically cost a lot more than the cameras do.

And then we do something unique, which is where we're using strobes above water and in the water.

And then we connected with five rods.

It's a radio waves and specially made cables and boxes.

We've created.

And so it's it's a little bit of a process, but it just kind of comes together now.

Wow.

Being photographed underwater is very calming.

It's very relaxing.

You slip under the water and everything just goes away.

It's like meditation.

Once you kind of get into it and you figure it out, it becomes pretty natural pretty quickly.

I mean, we were born with a sack of water.

Deep breaths, you know, like you could work on breathwork if you want to, especially in the professional space.

You know, a lot of us are free dive certified and things like that.

But for just like your first time, just relax and trust yourself.

It's fun.

We're in an Instagram driven world right in the Ticktock Twitter world, and this really lends itself to that.

So we tend to see a lot of younger women.

But as my business has changed and to where I'm working to try to create more gallery oriented stuff, I work with a lot of gay men and gay women, and their openness tends to make this a lot easier in the water because they're trying to express themselves in this water system.

Other media.

So Born This Way is a really fun project that I started a year ago.

I had a 15ft umbilical cord made that goes to a prosthetic belly button that goes on the person.

And the idea is basically that we're exploring how that I, I feel like everyone is predestined to be who they are in life.

And so especially in the LGBT, Q plus community, I'm wanting to embrace part of that, too.

And, you know, give them the opportunity to say, okay, this is who I am.

So Polk County, because we're wedged between Orlando and Tampa, right?

We don't necessarily get people thinking of us as an arts and cultural destination.

Scott's a perfect example of the type of creative artists and creative industries we have here in Polk County that maybe people in some of the larger urban areas around us aren't aware of.

But his works very creative.

He's thinking innovatively outside the box, so to speak.

Or maybe inside the pool.

And the fact that he's here in Polk County lends credence to what we're trying to do at the Polk Arts and Cultural Alliance, which is make Polk County a destination for arts and culture.

I like to say that a photograph is of a photograph, and so you print it.

As a photographer myself, I know the power of the printed image, and to see his work blown up, he had an exhibit and there were some, you know, ten by 20 banner sized pieces.

We're just amazing to see that all the pre-planning that went into it from the makeup, the clothing, the backdrop, the lighting, the finding, the right model, that's the culmination.

That for me is when I say, okay, this is something a problem?

Yeah.

Look, it's a reflection.

Of what I'm on my name, on.

All right.

That's that for another edition of Art rocks.

As always, each episode showcases original work by a Louisiana artist, and you'll find every one of them archived online at lpb.org/art rocks.

And if you appreciate discovering stories like these, consider subscribing to Country Roads magazine.

It's a vital guide for getting to grips with Louisiana's vibrant cultural life all across the state.

Until next week, I've been James Fox Smith and thank you for watching.

West Baton Rouge Museum is proud to provide local support for this program on LPB.

Offering diverse exhibitions throughout the year and programs that showcase art, history, music, and more, West Baton Rouge Museum culture cultivated Art rocks is made possible by the Foundation for Excellence in Louisiana Public Broadcasting and by viewers like you.

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