A LIFE OF MANY CHAPTERS...
Anna de Leon might describe her life as a Coat of Many Colors, with too many blessings to count. This amazing technicolor dreamcoat, a gift made up mostly of family, friends, music, art, writing, and community service has always warmed her. Her life with its many chapters might be better explained by sharing a bit of her story...

BORN INTO A WAR...
Anna’s Mami, proudly Puerto Rican, modeled her Caribbean culture rich in love, church, fun, family, all the arts, languages, and resourcefulness. Rooms were painted bright colors; for years a pet monkey had the run of the house. Anna’s first generation Estonian dad, a piano player, boxer, photographer and West Point man, modeled the arts and personal integrity. Hers was a home of no simple categories. Her parents met while he was stationed in Puerto Rico, completing what was then called “foreign duty”. Just after Anna was born, they lived for a few years in Oak Ridge, sometimes called The Atomic City, where the first bomb was developed. Anna’s earliest memories are of running away from Oak Ridge, into the Tennessee woods, with her Mami following and bringing her home. Anna just wouldn’t stay put and sometimes was tied to a tree. After the war, the family moved to Los Angeles looking for sun and open-minded people.

EARLY YEARS...
Anna’s childhood years were spent in the first integrated housing project in the United States, Roger Young Village, isolated in the middle of Griffith Park, next to the Los Angeles River. 1500 families, each living in close quarters in half a Quonset hut. This self-contained community included a market, stores, a movie theater and a grade school. Across the river, Glendale enforced an ordinance that required Blacks to leave town before dark. People were still segregated by race and culture.  Anna’s own birth certificate describes the race of her father as “white,” the race of her mother as “Spanish’” and ascribes her no race at all... the space is blank. 

For Anna, the village was a wonderful place to grow up, right in the middle of a huge park. Spanish and English were spoken. Yes, the family was poor, father severely disabled and unable to work. She knew hunger and the church free box. But she never felt poor. Maybe if everyone is poor, nobody is so poor. Every Monday night, folks of all races and cultures got together for the Community Sing, accompanied by a piano. And what a time it was! Anna sang her first solo there - "Springtime in the Rockies" -  when she was six. On Sunday mornings, the church held services in the movie theater, the organ in the aisle, the floor still sticky with candy from the night before. Everybody brought rubber kneelers and sang in the choir. 

Music was everywhere. Anna sang two- and three-part harmonies with her mother and sister while washing the dishes. Neighborhood kids sang in trios and quartets.  Her Papi played the piano until he passed on just before Anna was a teenager. Music - church, blues, country - was part of the fabric of daily life. And family art projects sometimes covered the living room floor. The traveling library brought all the books anyone could want to read. It was a version of rural living in the middle of the city. 

By the time she was in fourth grade, Anna sang in both the children’s choir and the adult choir, in Latin and in English. By high school, she loved both jazz and rhythm & blues. Her first date at the Hollywood Palladium was to catch the Robins, whose hit, "There’s a Riot Goin’ On In Cellblock Number Nine", was her favorite song at the time. Her teen years were spent with the Robins and the Coasters, the Platters and the Penguins, Marvin and Johnny, as well as Ella and Sarah and both Ettas. 

MUSIC AND MORE MUSIC...
In high school, Anna came to know and love jazz. At that time, the radio station that played rhythm & blues also played some jazz. Music City, the famous Hollywood record store, allowed teenagers in little booths with windows onto Sunset Boulevard to listen to any records they might buy. It was a place to meet friends and hang out. She grew to love all the jazz greats, music she didn’t hear at home. By the time she was sixteen, she was hearing live music in jazz clubs that didn’t care how old you were if you dressed up and came for the music.

A HOLLYWOOD GIRL...
In her twenties, Anna was an artist living below the huge Hollywood sign, spending her time with artists, poets and musicians. She was part of the L.A. jazz/poetry scene in her 20’s, and she showed her pictures in galleries and wrote poems. At his request, she designed a book cover for her friend Charles Bukowski. She designed and painted album covers. She worked for a time at Frederick’s of Hollywood; she did some modeling; she danced as a dime-a-dance girl at Roseland Roof; she danced with snakes in strip clubs. She sang in bars and clubs; her life was filled with live music. She paid her own rent and put food on her table. Sometimes it was rough and raw, sometimes funny and strange, never dull. She came to know all kinds of people and she surely knows the noir of the songs she sings. Not thinking of music as a “career” at the time, Anna attended U.C.L.A., receiving both a B.A. and M.A. in art/philosophy with help from the War Orphans’ Bill. 

When she was in her mid-twenties, she married Taj Mahal, now a prominent figure in blues and roots music. She sang with him early in his career and they share a daughter, Aya. When their marriage dissolved, she made a choice many women make: to fully parent rather than fully pursue a musical career that would take her on the road. She and Taj remain good friends. And while she never left music, she became active in her community and began living parallel lives: music and service.

COMMUNITY SERVICE...
In her early thirties, Anna had moved to Berkeley, the first city to desegregate its schools. She raised her daughter Aya and parented several foster children. She sang children to sleep, she sang to make work end more quickly, she sang in the car. She sang to stay alive. She earned her living as an artist, primarily as a ceramic sculptor, until she became allergic to materials. At a cross roads, and although she didn’t know any lawyers at the time, she decided to go to law school, in part, to make reforms to the foster care system where she was a foster mom.

Anna embraced community service, trying to make the world a better place. All along, her Mami would say, “A generous life is a wonderful and interesting life.” Hollywood seemed like a different world far away. She got her law degree at U.C. Berkeley School of Law and, as a civil rights lawyer for almost thirty years, has represented literally thousands of political demonstrators on issues that include homelessness, nuclear weaponry, disabled access, and discrimination. She was lead counsel for hundreds of Anti-Apartheid protesters on the Berkeley campus. She has litigated police misconduct cases and other civil rights cases against dozens of public entities. She represented a local newspaper in FOIA and Public Records Act cases. 

She was elected two terms to the Berkeley School Board, became president twice, and was the focus of hundreds of death threats which originated in Soldier of Fortune magazine when she led the fight for a high school curriculum that included alternatives to military service. She developed the legal education program now used in the local juvenile court as an alternative to incarceration. Anna has been named Woman of the Year by the National Women’s Political Caucus, and Outstanding Woman of Berkeley by the City of Berkeley, and the House of Representatives. Anna would say that working with friends made it all possible. 

ALWAYS, THERE HAS BEEN THE MUSIC...
All along, the arts have always been at the core of her self-definition, the prism through which Anna experiences the world. Even as a practicing lawyer, she sang with various small jazz bands in the S.F. Bay Area. She sang with a gospel trio, Higher Ground, until her main singing partner passed on from AIDS. She was the “chick singer” for the Delancey Street Jazz Band in San Francisco for a couple of years. She sings for shut-ins with Bread and Roses. She has sung in churches and on picket lines. She has presented music to the community in three music venues over about twenty years.

ANNA’S CLUBS...
When Aya entered college, she read an autobiography of Billie Holiday and showed Anna a life-changing quote. Billie had said, “All I ever wanted was a little place where I could serve good food and sing whenever I felt like it.”  Aya said, “Mami, you should do this.” For almost twenty years, Anna lived out Billie’s dream! 

In 1992, she opened “Anna’s” which was closed by a fire in an upstairs apartment a few years later. Then in 1997, she opened “Anna’s Jazz Bistro” and in 2005 she moved to a larger downtown venue, “Anna’s Jazz Island”. And a magical island it was, full of palm trees, wonderful staff, and music lovers. She booked live jazz every night, featuring local musicians. Over the years, Anna often sang with some of her favorite local piano players including Glen Pearson, Ellen Hoffman, Kelly Park, Dee Spencer, Jason Martineau, the late Ed Kelly, and Federico Cervantes. She hosted literally hundreds of events to benefit a wide variety of community causes. The local press, The Chronicle, the Tribune, the Contra Costa Times, the Planet, the Express, were generous and printed many favorable articles and reviews along the way. Anna closed the Island in 2010 due to the out-of-control parties/riots occurring next door. The unruly crowds, gunfire, and street closures by the police, prevented people from coming in to hear music. 

RECENT RECORDINGS...
“The Sweet Bittersweet” evolved from a desire to record some of her favorite songs, the ballads of rainy nights, the songs that light a candle on the dark days. Anna knows live music is the only way to make real music. She brought together some of her favorite really gifted musicians who have the heart for these songs but who would not want to rehearse the life out of them: Kenny Barron, Peter Barshay, Harold Jones, and Taj Mahal. In two afternoons, live at Fantasy Studios, they made the music you hear recorded live on that album. The premier jazz critic, Nat Hentoff, wrote the liner notes. That album can be purchased at CDBaby.com.

Anna’s album “Love in the Lost and Found” is made up of the songs recorded by Ray Charles, Sam Cooke, Johnny Taylor, Dinah Washington, Ivory Joe Hunter, Joe Tex, Percy Mayfield and others, songs that influenced Anna’s music so long ago. She calls these songs the "Soulful American Songbook" and recorded them live in one evening at Anna’s Jazz Island with some of her favorite musicians: Glen Pearson, Ruth Davies and Dave Rokeach. What a time it was! This recording will be available soon.

Anna is a Taoist, what others might even call a fatalist. Her daily life is a bit quieter now. Of course, she sings... at weddings, at memorials, at concerts, at rehab centers, in shelters, in the shower, in the car, to her granddaughter... As Anna would say, she came to sing. And she writes. She is working on a couple of book projects, some of which will be shared here soon. And she dearly loves being an engaged abuelita to a beautiful baby girl. Anna’s life is still full of many blessings, too many to count!

Lena Doenna, February 14, 2011