Seattle vocalist-musician Amy Denio juggles multiple musical beats

Amy Denio strides up onto the Chapel Performance Space stage and with no preamble belts out a sonorous, soulful wail that lets people know she can fill the hall with sound without any need for amplification.

Then she walks over to a microphone hooked up to a gizmo called a Line6 delay modeler and proceeds to put her four-octave voice to the test through a series of electronic echo chambers and filters.

The effect is spooky, rhythmic, playful.

Denio's voice alone could have made her reputation. But she's also a saxophonist, clarinetist, bass player, guitarist, accordionist and dabbler in "percussion-y things." Her latest CD is a best-of package that copes with her prolific output by focusing on just one of the instruments she plays. Its title: "Tutto Bene: Canzoni Sulla Fisa" ("All's Well: Accordion Songs").

Denio also composes scores for choreographers who include Pat Graney, Cheronne Wong, UMO Ensemble and David Dorfman (she won a 1997 Bessie Award for her score to Dorfman's "Sky Down"). And she has been in a dozen or more bands since moving to Seattle in 1985, most famously the Billy Tipton Memorial Saxophone Quartet.

That doesn't include her stints with bands and ensembles in Austria, Switzerland, Estonia, Taiwan, Hungary, India and Italy. Right now, her projects include the Tiptons, Hell's Bellows! (an accordion quartet), Correo Aereo (a Latin-American trio), the Yellow Hat Band (brass-band world music) and Kultur Shock, a "Bosnian Gypsy core" outfit that just completed a 40-city European tour.

This gal isn't just talented. She's busy.

Steve Peters, a Seattle composer/sound artist and director of Non sequitur (which oversees the Wayward Music Series at the Good Shepherd Center), says Denio is "one of the only musicians I know who makes a living playing exactly the music she wants to play. ... And she's done it while based in Seattle, which is both admirable and miraculous. That has as much to do with hard work and perseverance as it does with talent. She is constantly on the road, always playing somewhere. Her touring schedule would have ground me into dust decades ago."

Denio, 48, grew up in the Detroit area, where her parents were both musicians. She figures that she heard her first music prenatally. By the time she was a toddler, she was hooked on rhythm.

"There'd be rehearsals at home," she recalled in an interview last month. "I'd sit next to the drummer and go: Look at that! How does he do all that at once? It was great."

At home in Seattle

After going to college in Massachusetts, Denio picked as a home Seattle, sight unseen, when a drummer she knew returned from the city, brandished a copy of the now-defunct music paper The Rocket, and exclaimed, "Look at all these clubs! Look at all these musicians! Look at the people you can collaborate with."

His enthusiasm convinced Denio that Seattle would be the right place for her.

"And it really has been," she says. "From the moment I moved. All these — I wouldn't call them coincidences, but more like crossed paths and convergences ... "

By 1991 she had put out several solo albums on her own Spoot Music label and had recorded an album with her band the Tone Dogs, "Ankety Low Day," that was nominated for a best-new-recording Grammy.

Her gradual discovery of her extraordinary vocal range is a story unto itself.

"I smoked for 15 years and I sang, but not all that much," Denio confesses. Then she quit for 7 or 8 years and her voice got "nice and clear," letting her hit some pretty high notes.

That ended when she went on tour with a band, Pale Nudes, in which everyone but Denio smoked: "It was maddening," she says. By the end of the tour, she was smoking again and immediately noticed a marked, unpleasant effect on her voice.

"My larynx felt kind of blocked," she says, "and I lost those high notes. But I discovered that I could get even higher notes and be able to control them — through the damage to my larynx, I guess."

Denio describes the effect as "supersonic," and she's not kidding. When you hear it on recordings, it sounds more like a theremin than anything human.

Peters confirms, "Her singing never ceases to amaze me. She just opens her mouth and the most incredible things come out."

Jessica Lurie, Denio's fellow saxophonist in the Tiptons, emphasizes that Denio's gifts as a collaborator are just as key an element of her musical personality. "We laugh a lot when we work together. The music business can be quite brutal at times, so the ability to not be super-serious all the time is really crucial. Amy is also fast and spontaneous — which is great when we are working to make a piece or arrangement come together quickly."

Choreographer Pat Graney adds that Denio is "endlessly inventive, irreverent, clowny, brilliant and always driving from the heart."

A plethora of projects

Denio has had her own home recording studio for almost as long as she's been playing in Seattle. Her earliest solo albums were all made, according to their liner notes, in "spacious Spoot Studios ... the 4x8 foot space between the bed and the wall." ("Spacious Spoot Studios" eventually became "Spaciouser Spoot Studios," now occupying a whole room in Denio's West Seattle home.)

Spoot Music continues to keep Denio busy with her solo activities, her Tiptons Sax Quartet collaborations (released in conjunction with Lurie's Zipa! Music) and, lately, an unusual producing project: recording tribal Taiwanese children playing Brazilian sambas. "A surreal commission," Denio acknowledges in the liner notes of "Naruwan," the resulting CD, "so I said yes."

The downside to all this activity?

"When I come home I just want to be alone," Denio says. "But that means that my social life here is not as strong as it used to be."

Denio can't put her finger on the specific menu of musical activities that works for her. There's no neat allotment of time for saxophone vs. accordion, rock bands vs. solo projects: "It's more how the music speaks to me. Is it music that I love? In the case of Kultur Shock, they're working with melodies that are 500 years old that are from the Balkans ... full of pathos and beauty and deep sadness, all at the same time. And it's fun to play in a band that makes people dance."

The Tiptons continue going strong, too: "It's been 20 years. It's just difficult because three people live in New York and one lives in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. So we don't see each other quite as often as we used to, when everyone lived here."

The Tiptons may no longer be based in Seattle, but Denio believes she's here for good: "If I were to move anywhere else I would just be starting from scratch."

Still, she spends as much time as she can in Italy and, during the Bush administration, tried to figure out a way to stay there permanently. But while she finds some aspects of American culture "kind of empty" ("It's all about the politics of image, how things appear"), she still sees herself strongly as an American.

"I was born that way," she says. "So I decided that rather than escape from America, I'd really rather see what I can do to enrich the culture — even if it's only on a very local West Seattle level."

Michael Upchurch: mupchurch@seattletimes.com