Debbie Duncan died on December 18, 2020, in a Golden Valley nursing home, following a series of strokes. She was 69. The Star Tribune had called her a “pre-eminent” vocalist in the local jazz scene. The Current called her Minnesota’s “First Lady of Song.” The Dakota’s founder, Lowell Pickett, wrote that her talent, generous spirit, and personal warmth had made her one of the most admired and best-loved artists in Minnesota’s musical life. Andrew Walesch, music director at Crooners supper club, put it simply: “She was a queen to all of us. Period.”
I knew Debbie Duncan the way you know someone who has been central to your professional world for decades — perhaps not intimately, but with the accumulated depth of forty years of shared scenes. I was there when she opened for Herbie Hancock at the Dakota’s second-ever Guthrie concert in 1989, an appearance that, according to MinnPost, Pickett described as magical and that he believed should have launched her nationally. I saw her at the Artist’s Quarter, at the Twin Cities Jazz Festival where she sometimes sang multiple sets in a single day, at the Dakota where she could often be found at the bar watching other musicians even when she wasn’t performing.
She was perhaps the most generous musician in a city that values generosity. She was also, arguably, the finest jazz vocalist the Twin Cities produced in the second half of the twentieth century.
How She Got Here
Debbie Lucille Duncan was born in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1951 and grew up in Detroit in a family steeped in jazz, gospel, and classical music. According to the Twin Cities Jazz Festival, she studied flute at Wayne State University while continuing to develop her voice — eventually, vocally, outpacing everything else. She spent time in Los Angeles from approximately 1976 to 1983, including a seven-year run at the Hungry Tiger club. In 1984, drummer Pete Johnson — formerly of the Manhattan Transfer — was taking a job at Rupert’s Nightclub in Golden Valley and convinced Duncan to come to Minneapolis for what was billed as six weeks.
The six weeks lasted seven years. At Rupert’s — reportedly the largest club that had ever opened in the Twin Cities at the time — Duncan was one of six rotating singers, something the venue’s management said had never been done in Minnesota before. She assembled a quartet there with pianist Don Stille, bassist Gary Raynor, and drummer Phil Hey. According to the Dakota, they soon began a weekly residency at the new Dakota location at Bandana Square in St. Paul.
She never left Minnesota after that. She sang here for the next thirty-six years.
What She Won and Who She Opened For
The Minnesota Music Awards named her Jazz Vocalist of the Year so many times they eventually retired her from the category, awarding her instead the designation “Perpetually Outstanding Performer” — the first MMA to carry that designation. She won Best Female Jazz Vocalist from both the Minnesota Music Awards and the Minnesota Black Music Awards. According to Twin Cities PBS’s MN Original profile, her awards were innumerable.
She opened for Herbie Hancock, DeeDee Bridgewater, Miles Davis, and Lou Rawls when they came through Minneapolis and St. Paul. She performed at the Capri, the Chanhassen, and the Minnesota State Fair. She sang in Paris, New York, and Qatar. According to MinnPost, Leigh Kamman interviewed her in January 1994 for The Jazz Image — shortly after her first trip to Paris over Christmas and New Year’s. At the time, she was perhaps already the most recognizable jazz voice in the state.
In 1993, when the Dakota was still at Bandana Square, Duncan recorded the club’s first-ever live album there. Nearly twenty-five years later, in 2017, she recorded Full Circle — her second live album at the Dakota, this time at 1010 Nicollet Mall. Five studio and live albums across her career, each one documenting a voice that the Star Tribune’s Jon Bream called evidence of a “pre-eminent” talent.
What Made Her Voice Different
Jazz vocals are a discipline with a specific internal logic. The vocalist is simultaneously an improviser — capable of altering phrasing, timing, and interpretation in real time — and a storyteller, which requires keeping the song and lyric legible as the music moves beneath it. Too much improvisation and the song disappears. Too little and it is not jazz.
Duncan had the quality that separates jazz vocalists from singers who happen to be singing jazz: she heard the music, she heard the band, she heard the room, and she adjusted. According to Walesch, she was always going to take chances. They could rehearse a tune thoroughly and she would wing it onstage, creating in the moment. “She was a true jazz musician,” he told the Star Tribune. “And that’s a very rare thing.”
Jack McDuff and a Telling Story
According to MinnPost’s remembrance, there is a story about Duncan and Captain Jack McDuff that perhaps captures her stature in the scene better than any award list could. Jimmy McGriff had recorded a jazz album with sessions partly held in the Twin Cities, and Duncan had sung “Dr. Feelgood” in Aretha Franklin’s arrangement — and nailed it. The song was getting significant radio airplay. When there was talk of having her appear as a guest at a festival where McGriff was headlining, McDuff reportedly said: “McGriff don’t want her up on stage with him.” What he meant was that she would get all the attention.
That is the kind of thing people say about a singer who is genuinely dangerous on a stage.
What She Gave the Scene
Patty Peterson — who, according to the Star Tribune’s obituary, knew Duncan as well as anyone in the Twin Cities jazz community — said she was “an artist who could have been well known worldwide.” The reason she wasn’t, Peterson suggested, was that she was also a caretaker — for family members, for younger musicians, for the community that the Twin Cities jazz scene needs to function.
Duncan taught with various organizations, particularly encouraging Black youth to take up instruments and learn jazz history. As she told the Current: “We created it, we need to be expressing it, we need to be a part of it.” She was not simply performing in this city — she was building it.
The KBEM Jazz 88 radio series “Minnesota Voices: Certain Standards,” produced in 2010 and 2011 by host Arne Fogel, included Duncan as one of five featured singers, each recording thirteen songs at Wild Sound Studios. That series, broadcast to over 100,000 weekly listeners, may be the most substantial audio documentation of her work that exists.
She died in December 2020. The Twin Cities jazz scene has not had a vocalist quite like her since, and is unlikely to again.
Debbie Duncan’s recordings — including her live albums at the Dakota — are available on streaming platforms. The Star Tribune, MinnPost, and Jazz Police all published substantial remembrances following her death in December 2020 that are worth seeking out.
