[tstew]

This is what she was quoted as saying afterwards
"What she said was that she was very sorry, that she meant no disrespect, that she was trying to make a creative expression of her love for the country,"

Interestingly enough, I found some things in her bio as well. She may not have been the safest choice in the first place......

But top jazz musicians everywhere know Marie. So do a growing number of fervent jazz listeners. They're knocked out by her voice's suppleness and range, impeccable pitch and all-out way of living every lyric.

They also know about her penchant for risk - for defying authoritarian club owners, for liberating standard tunes from their ancient cocoons, for launching her socially provocative originals, with scant rehearsal, in packed concert halls. They know how she reinvents material from unlikely sources - Bonnie Raitt, Bob Seger, The Beatles.

Closer to home, Denver pianist Jeff Jenkins says: "She has the most complete vision of anyone I've ever worked with. She creates her own universe, and it's never the same twice. She's really into the give-and-take with other musicians, and once you enter that universe, there's complete freedom."

A daring medley

Marie calls herself a "GRITS" ("a Girl Raised in the South") but no one below the Mason-Dixon Line, or anywhere else, knows what to think the first time he hears the most daring medley in her repertoire.

When she first sang it in Mississippi, every jaw in the place dropped. When she called the tune, using its short name, in early rehearsal at the recording studio, drummer Jeff "Tain" Watts, who came up with New Orleans-born trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, dropped his sticks and said, "I'm not playing that."

Not playing what?

Marie, who relishes the drama of the unexpected, had thought to pair the traditional white anthem Dixie with the heartbreaking meditation on lynching Strange Fruit. She brought off the collision of opposites as an ironic comment on the way the world still works.

In Mississippi, black and white audience members approached her afterward with tears in their eyes and tragic stories to tell. The same thing happened everywhere else, too. Born in controversy, Dixie/Strange Fruit became the emotional centerpiece of Marie's much- praised CD Vertigo.

Anyone shopping for symbols can find one right there, illustrating the purposes of Marie's unblinking, semiautobiographical work.

"I want to make you laugh and cry," she says. "I want you to squirm uncomfortably in your chair, think of a loved one, get angry, hang your head in shame and raise your hand in protest. . . . I want you to take that leap, make that change, turn that corner."

That's just what she's done herself for the past decade, of course.