Masterful Esther Haynes

When Esther Haynes was in the sixth grade at Arlington’s Taylor Elementary School, her teacher gave her a very special gift: Music lessons.

“She taught fingerstyle guitar,” remembers Miss Haynes, who will be singing early jazz, bossa nova and blues Sunday at La Porta’s restaurant, 1600 Duke St. in Alexandria. “I just loved playing.”

These days Miss Haynes plays banjo as well as guitar, but she’s probably best known for her singing — old standards like “Exactly Like You,” “Billie’s Blues,” and “Sugar Moon.” With a voice that has been likened to honey with a dash of pepper, her mixture of musical styles along with her own brand of soul has earned her three Washington Area Music Award nominations for jazz vocals/traditional music.

From those early lessons in the sixth grade, it was just a short hop to the banjo and bluegrass. Four years at Virginia Tech led to almost nightly jam sessions and frequent attendance at fiddlers’ conventions. Back then, bluegrass was at the heart of it all.

“I’m from Virginia,” she says emphatically. “For me, bluegrass is part of my identity.”

But one day while she was driving back to college with her brother, he put on a tape of Billie Holiday.

“I was stunned,” she remembers. “Her voice was just so incredible.”

Soon Miss Haynes was raiding her parent’s record collection, listening to the likes of Charlie Christian, Sippie Wallace, Helen Humes, and Anita O’Day. And of course, Ella Fitzgerald.

What tied it all together?

“They had voices that could cut across a band,” says Miss Haynes. “And they could change their [vocal] quality to match the genre.”

It’s precisely that quality, she says, that she strives for in her own music today, whether she is singing early jazz from the ‘20s, swing music from the ‘40s, or an old Billie Holiday tune.

Miss Haynes’ incipient interest in blues and jazz continued after college as she moved on to studies at the prestigious Berklee College of Music in Boston. There, she met up with Hiro Arita, a fellow student who taught her to play swing and hot jazz in the style of Django Reinhardt.

Soon, she was playing and singing in the acoustic bluegrass/swing group Boston City Limits, and working with fingerstyle guitarist Larry Unger in a ragtime/blues duo.

It was, she says, a time to broaden musical horizons after pushing the envelope on what the various genres could offer.

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