MusicMakers
The Family Act, With an Edge
Jobari Parker-Namdar, with Bobbe Shore on the guitar, sings during a performance with his mother, Pam Parker, below, at Signature Theatre. Both mother and son cite the other as the inspiration for their music.
(Photos By Leah L. Jones For The Washington Post)
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Friday, August 1, 2008
"It's more than you, it is more than me,
Whatever dreams we have, they're for the family."
The song "Family" comes from "Dreamgirls," the 1981 Broadway smash musical and 2007 Hollywood flick for which Jennifer Hudson won an Academy Award.
Singing this sentimental ballad Tuesday night at Blues Alley in Georgetown will be a real Washington family, the mother-and-son duo of Pam Parker, 46, and Jobari Parker-Namdar, 22, a remarkable partnership that seems to defy categorization.
"We're not exactly the Von Trapp family singers," Parker-Namdar says in a stage whisper, slyly referring to "The Sound of Music," which gave the world such sugary classics as "Climb Ev'ry Mountain" and "Do-Re-Mi."
"We like music," Parker-Namdar says with a smile. "Maybe songs with a little more bite."
Parker-Namdar brought that bite to a spring stint in "The Stephen Schwartz Project" at Old Town Alexandria's MetroStage. Post theater critic Peter Marks praised the "resonant baritone" that Parker-Namdar used to bring down the house night after night with "Cold Enough to Snow."
Now in his third year as a Howard University music and theater major, the Washington-born singer lives in Glover Park with his father, an Iranian who fled his country's repressive regime in the 1970s. Parker-Namdar had his first solo concert at Signature Theatre's summer cabaret program last week. In September, he'll play the title role in "Jonah Live on Stage Water Whale and All!" at Alexandria's New Horizons Theater.
"Jobari is why I'm into music," says his mother, Pam Parker, during a recent interview with her son. "I watched him as he grew up singing as a kid in school" at Westland Middle School in Montgomery County, then at Duke Ellington School of the Arts in the District, and at the University of Michigan, where he studied classical voice.
"Mom, you inspired me," Parker-Namdar teases. "I couldn't walk around the house without hearing you doing some kind of music. . . . I had to sing to survive."
These heady days for the mother-son duo seem a long way from when Parker, a D.C. native, supported herself as an electrician. But it was during her time as a member of the local International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers that her -- and her son's -- musical roots took form. "The union got me into a lot of protests," she recalls. "It was the whole progressive thing, the rallies supporting union workers, against the wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua, and especially apartheid and Nelson Mandela."
As a youngster, Parker-Namdar not only heard his mother sing protests songs in front of the South African Embassy but knew his parents were arrested for civil disobedience.
Parker met Mandela in the 1990s, calling his release "proof that nonviolence is a powerful force, and all his suffering and all the stuff we put up with here had meaning." Not that the struggles are over, either politically or personally.
"One of my problems as a singer," Parker-Namdar says, "is that we live in a world that seems to love identity. People see me and automatically start assigning ideas and beliefs to me because I'm half African American and half Iranian, with a Christian mother and a Muslim father.
"It drives me crazy," he says, "because I have my own identify, and it isn't this or that, but all of me is African American and Iranian. I know the Lord's Prayer and I can recite bits of the Koran in Arabic. I love old Persian folks songs and 'Spamalot,' I love Korean rap, world music, country music."
"I love everything," he says, somewhat exasperatedly.
"It'll be all right," coos his mother, touching his hand, as if she has heard this lament before.
Still Parker-Namdar knows that music opens a door for "my describing myself as I see fit, so I can grow and overcome or ignore social constraints people assign to me," he says. Being an artist affords him "more freedom, oddly, than I thought."
Pam Parker and Jobari Parker-Namdar Appearing Tuesday at Blues Alley, 1073 Wisconsin Ave. NW. Shows start at 8 and 10 p.m. Tickets:$18. Available at the box office, 202-337-4141, or http:/
