SING FOR THE ANGELS, PAM

I've just received the sad news that jazz singer and composer Pam Bricker has died.

Pam Bricker was one of the great vocal stylists of the DC club scene. She sang mostly in the jazz idiom, but she was quite versatile. I knew her only from her club performances, but she always was quite gracious to me. She exuded an inner (and outer!) beauty.

Beer enthusiasts may remember her Brickskeller performance for Michael Jackson’s - the beer writer - 60th birthday party.

Among two other albums of hers, I have an album from her time in the early 1990s with Rick Harris (of Mad Romance) at DC's Henley Park Hotel. On the album, the duo perform one of the more astonishing versions of All the Things You Are that I've ever heard. I have been fortunate enough to hear her perform it live.

I recently heard her perform at her regular Sunday evening gig at Club Utopia.

From her website, I've learned that Pam was a dedicated supporter of Heifer International, an organization whose mission is to "promote a world of communities equitably sharing the resources of a healthy planet."

Perhaps an appropriate manner by which to honor her considerable contributions to the Washington music scene would be to make a donation to this cause which she supported.