After a brush with death, singer Tammi Brown embraces her second chance at life

Tammi Brown is Santa Cruz County’s Artist of the Year. But less than a year ago — a mere nine months ago, to be exact — the prospect that she would be alive and well enough to enjoy such a recognition seemed unlikely, even remote. 

Yet, here in the summer of 2024, the beloved and well-known Santa Cruz jazz/gospel vocalist is as active and prominent as she’s ever been. And on Saturday, family, friends and fans can all gather to celebrate right alongside her. 

It’s the best possible outcome of certainly the most harrowing year in Brown’s life. Last September, she was diagnosed with Stage 4 ovarian cancer, which had spread so deeply into her lungs that her right lung had effectively collapsed. Her condition was so dire that, at one point, she was preparing to die.

“I just accepted it,” she said, reflecting on the events of last fall. “I just got calm and quiet and peaceful in it, and took in every second of every day as it was given to me. I just figured, OK, if this is how it ends … I even got kind of excited. I mean, I can see my mom.” (Brown’s mother died when Tammi was only 14.)

After her initial treatments, she was barely able to walk. She couldn’t dress herself, could barely feed herself. She was hooked to an oxygen tank 24 hours a day: “If I came off of it for, like, 30 seconds, I could feel myself dying.” 

Yet, without surgery, she was able to recover, and sing again. In October, she was released from the hospital. In November, she was able to get off the supplemental oxygen. By December, she was taking the first steps toward singing again.

“It was a collaboration of many things that really inspired the healing for Tammi,” said her friend and musical collaborator Lauren Monroe. “But her will and her willingness to change was the big part, because you can have all the elements of modern technology and people that love you surrounding you, but it’s an inside job to shift into this miraculous state of health that she’s experienced.”

Brown has been a significant presence on the Santa Cruz musical scene for two decades as a singer ready to participate in any number of collaborations and settings, in festivals, as a guest vocalist, a recording artist, a frontperson. Having grown up on the Peninsula steeped in the gospel music of the Black church, young Tammi was shielded from the influence of secular music by her strictly religious father. But her mother and aunt subverted her father’s wishes, exposing her to the rich cornucopia of African American popular music of the 1960s and ’70s, from Ella Fitzgerald to James Brown. By the time she was a teenager and aspiring singer, she had fallen under the spell of the magnetic Chaka Khan.

Since moving to Santa Cruz in the early 2000s, however, Brown has wandered widely artistically, exploring unfamiliar vocal styles and diving even deeper into familiar ones, particularly the Great American Songbook. Since then, she has recorded and performed with several towering names in popular music from Stanley Jordan to Bobby McFerrin. 

“The thing that makes her unique is her ability to tap into her soul and communicate through her voice,” said Monroe. “I really feel that singing is her life. That’s her way to connect, and she does it really, really well.”

Ironically, Brown was unaware of the disease that almost killed her until it manifested in her lungs. A year ago, while doing a tribute show to Ella Fitzgerald at the Kuumbwa Jazz Center, Brown noticed something a bit off about her vocal performance, but didn’t think much of it. “I thought it was some kind of asthma thing or something,” she said.

Months later, she was scheduled to travel to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, to perform with Monroe and her husband, drummer Rick Allen. Jackson Hole is at a high elevation, and Brown decided to get checked out by her doctor before her travels. 

“I was just telling her that I was having a bit of trouble breathing,” she said. “So she listened to my lungs and she didn’t hear anything from my right lung. So they did a high-altitude test on my lungs. I just thought it was COVID. So I left the office for rehearsal, still preparing to leave for the tour the next day. And while I was at the rehearsal, the doctor called and said, ‘If you get on that plane, you will die at 2,500 meters.’”

She was informed that her left lung was overcompensating for the complete collapse of her right lung, and she could die at any moment without treatment. She was immediately admitted to the hospital, where doctors worked to drain her lung. “The moment my right lung reinflated, I’ll never forget it,” she said. “It felt like someone punched me in the back, and I was able to take a deep breath for the first time in a long time.”

As she struggled to heal, Brown was overwhelmed with messages and well-wishes from friends and fans. “I really had no idea so many people cared about me,” she said. “I mean, sure, maybe two or three. But it was hundreds of people [who reached out to me]. Bobby McFerrin called me every day when I was in the hospital, even on the days when I couldn’t say hardly anything because I couldn’t get enough air. And Bobby would call and say, ‘Let’s sing.’ And I could only do a little.”

After she got off the oxygen tank, close friends arranged two concerts on her behalf, one in Santa Cruz and another in Monterey. Both shows were sellouts. 

“Santa Cruz was really there for her,” said Monroe, “and Monterey too. The outpouring of love, the people who showed up, the musicians who donated their time, I think all of that was part of her healing as well.”

On top of her own brush with mortality, Brown had to cope with another enormous loss, that of her friend and fellow Santa Cruz musician Marla Stone Lyons, known by her stage name Star La’Moan, who was also suffering from cancer. She died in November.

“We became really close friends during her cancer time,” said Brown, “and we would talk every day. So I had to tell her, ‘I’m Stage 4,’ and she was just in disbelief.”

She is reluctant to say that her cancer is in remission: “With Stage 4, you’re always going to have it. But will it overtake me? Not right now.”

Still, she said her cancer markers indicate that she’s in relatively good health. She feels fine, and she’s ready to pick up her busy life as a performer. Back on her schedule are two long-anticipated trips overseas, to India to study the tonal method of Indian singing, and to Egypt, where her late mother traced her ethnic roots. 

Artistically, Brown is moving in new directions as well, particularly as a songwriter. She is particularly anxious to debut a new song that she wrote at Saturday’s Kuumbwa show. It’s called “No Fear.”

“Songs come to me,” she said. “But I’ve always been hesitant to present them to any kind of general audience because it opens me up a little bit, and I’ve never been comfortable with that. But I’m turning over a whole new leaf. Being in the balance between life and death, you just develop a whole new perspective on life. It becomes so much more fragile and so much more meaningful to me. So I’m just laying it all out there on the line. I have another chance at life. For some reason, I’m still here and I wasn’t supposed to be.”

Tammi Brown performs as Santa Cruz County Artist of the Year on Saturday, June 22, at the Kuumbwa Jazz Center. Showtime is 7 p.m. The show is free. 

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