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When Annie Clark was a teenager, she went on the road with her aunt and uncle’s jazz duo, Tuck & Patti.
It sounds like the plot of a quirky indie comedy or a coming-of-age novel, but it’s the origin story of the artist now known as St. Vincent—yes, the same St. Vincent whose collaborators range from David Byrne to Taylor Swift; who produced Sleater-Kinney’s 2019 album, The Center Won’t Hold; and whom Rolling Stone named the 26th-best guitarist of all time. Clark describes her time as her aunt and uncle’s roadie as “a real amazing trial by fire.”
“I learned sort of what it’s really like to be on the road and how fun and exhausting and insane it is,” Clark tells WW. “Also, I feel like it’s important to know all the different aspects of your craft. My uncle was teaching me about engineering and about electricity, and certainly, certainly getting to watch them perform every night was really inspiring and informative. Just how you bring your whole self to it, no matter how tired you are, if the plane was delayed, or the baggage didn’t come, or whatever. You just do the thing.”
Tuck & Patti—aka William Charles “Tuck” Andress and Patricia “Patti” Cathcart Andress, who met in 1978 and have been touring and recording together since the 1980s—are still going strong. And in March, they’ll reunite with their famous niece on a Portland stage. St. Vincent headlines the 2026 Biamp Portland Jazz Festival, with Tuck & Patti opening her March 6 performance at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall. The Biamp Jazz Festival is a 10-day citywide festival featuring more than 50 concerts across more than 30 venues. In addition to St. Vincent and Tuck & Patti, the festival will also bring Mavis Staples, Madeleine Peyroux and the Bill Frissell Trio—and in addition to ticketed performances, the festival will include more than a dozen partner events with Portland musicians, and more than 20 free performances across the city, with venues ranging from Wilf’s to the Jack London Revue to Director Park.
St. Vincent, whose music has been variously described as “art rock,” “indie rock” or “pop”—maybe with “avant-garde” preceding one of those descriptors—might not be the most intuitive choice to headline a jazz festival. But she’s never fit neatly into any one category. Her performance also follows closely on the heels of a three-night October residency at New York’s Carlyle Hotel, where she played guitar and was accompanied by pianist Rachel Eckroth. Those shows had a more jazzy, cabaret vibe, she says, and that’s the kind of performance she plans for Portland.
“In an alternate reality, I just would have been like a cabaret singer, and I would have just lived the story of ‘Lush Life’ like that,” Clark says. “That’s not too far off.”
The set includes songs that don’t usually get included in her rock shows, such as “Hang On Me,” from her 2017 album, Masseduction, as well as some covers and songs from her earlier albums.
“It’s almost like my jazz club cabaret fever dream, you know?” Clark says. “I just hope I don’t get arrested by the jazz police.”
Clark is quick to rattle off her favorite jazz artists, including Thelonius Monk, Charles Mingus, Sonny Rollins and Ella Fitzgerald (“there’s never been a better voice than Ella Fitzgerald in the history of the earth”). Jazz was, she says, a big part of her early musical education—due in no small part to having jazz musicians in her family. “This is yet another brilliant Black American art form,” Clark says.
“I’m not a completist by any means, but I definitely have some of that vernacular in my bones, just from growing up with jazz musicians in the family who, when I was a 14-year-old, played me John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme and then gave me a box of records and said, ‘Go study,” Clark adds. “You know, ‘Listen, welcome, you want to be a musician, OK? Well, you need to be aware of this pantheon of these gods before you can enter.’”
SEE IT: St. Vincent with Tuck & Patti at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall, 1037 SW Broadway, portland5.com. 8 pm Friday, March 6. $94.86–$139.38. The Biamp Portland Jazz Festival runs March 5-14 at venues across the city. For more information, visit pdxjazz.com.
