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Wednesday, August 1, 2018
NETHERLANDS/TURKEY: Announcing new project 'Embracing Colours'
Monday, July 30, 2018
USA/INDIA: Dual Musicianship: Pianist and Hindustani Vocalist Anita Aysola Cross-Pollinates and Cultivates Personal Hybrids on Beyond Our Dreams
Dual Musicianship: Pianist and Hindustani Vocalist Anita Aysola Cross-Pollinates and Cultivates Personal Hybrids on Beyond Our Dreams
Years ago, the Indian-born, Michigan-raised, Atlanta-based singer-songwriter Anita Aysola was weighing a career as a concert pianist. One afternoon, however, she played a piece for her sister’s music professor. The professor listened carefully and asked one unforgettable question: “What if you brought your Indian classical training into this?” she wondered, pointing at the piano.
That moment stuck with Aysola for decades. Then, in 2008, she dived into a favorite raga and wrote “Long Way Home,” one of her first songs that bridged her two lifelong loves, Western classical and jazz, and Hindustani classical. Highly trained in both disciplines, Aysola uncovered how beautifully they could blossom together, once cross pollinated.
Aysola’s exploration and discovery are intimately American, a theme she unpacks musically, lyrically, and emotionally on her latest album, Beyond Our Dreams. Produced by a polymath actor and composer of Indian heritage, Samrat Chakrabarti, in collaboration with musical polyglots from the Brooklyn Raga Massive circle, Aysola’s songs fold radiant flights of Indian-style improvisation and rhythm into solid storytelling and piano chops. Think Anoushka Shankar meets Randy Newman.
“For a long time, I felt I had to be one or the other, Indian or American, in both my music and my life,” reflects Aysola. “Once I broke through that assumption, I realized the power of being both, of creating my own personal hybrid.” That hybrid speaks poignantly to our time of either/or, to divisive political and cultural rhetoric, with a tender but unforgiving tension, a heartfelt and incisive ambiguity.
Aysola never set out to be a professional musician, though she took both Indian and Western classical music seriously from an early age, studying piano and Hindustani classical vocals, singing in the school chorus and at Hindu religious gatherings, and playing in orchestra and band. She even took sitar lessons for a while. “I would play other music by ear,” recalls Aysola. “In Hindustani classical music, you learn how to play harmonium by ear, whatever you hear. So I’d listen to Tori Amos. She was the first person I heard growing up who was a female piano player who also sang and wrote at the same time.”
However, like many daughters of immigrant families, she resolved to find a more predictable professional career, and her formal education spans everything from engineering to international education policy. Yet music became increasingly important to the young artist, and she found herself longing to write songs, not simply perform other’s creations.
She began to study more Western styles involving improvisation, especially jazz and blues. While living in Chicago, she connected with master boogie-woogie blues pianist Erwin Helfer. There and while in grad school in Boston, she played everything from trip hop to jam-based rock to Indian fusion, before focusing more intensively on her own material. Then after a move to Houston, she met Gary Norian, who became her jazz piano mentor and frequent co-writer. Norian’s influence can be felt strongly on tracks like “Bet on Us,” with its rollicking, uplifting New Orleans meets gospel feel.
Her songwriting sprouted from all these seemingly disparate experiences, connected by her love of piano and Indian vocal approaches. “I felt this real need to bring all my passions into my music. To make it a home for both cultures,” Aysola recalls. “I’m one person in all these things, and my music could speak to all these things.” How this would work became a matter of experimentation. “I thought it would be the goofiest thing, sargam [solfege] improvisation over piano. I thought people would laugh,” she recalls. “People loved it. They wanted more.”
Inspiration can run in both directions for Aysola. For “Long Way Home,” she used a raga (raag desh) as a springboard for the song’s melody. “Beyond our Dreams,” written for her youngest child, “toggles between raag jog and jazz and the blues, especially in the piano solo” thanks to the role thirds play in the raga. For “America,” a love song for a country striving for universal ideals despite recent rancour, Aysola found the chords first, then began to play with Indian elements on top. “As I was finishing this song, I was jamming out with my new Hindustani vocal teacher,” says Aysola. “I realized the sargam felt really good with the chords I already had in mind.”
Aysola, with help from Chakrabarti, unites with musical kindred spirits on Beyond Our Dreams, artists who can move fluidly between Indian and Western styles. “Sameer [Gupta] plays the drum kit like a mridangam and the tabla like a drum kit. Everyone on the album,” including Arun Ramamurthy on violin and Jay Gandhi on bansuri flute, “brought that fusion sensibility. Samrat would suggest, ‘Hey try some alaaps [extended improvisions] here, that might work.’ Everyone got what I’m doing and could even encourage it, to help me find that sound.”
The lyrics in Aysola’s songs have a similar--and similarly complementary--dual nature, dwelling in two realities at once, be it as a person of two cultures, or of several callings, as a musician and a mother and wife. “Beyond Our Dreams” captures that tension and the hope and inspiration it brings, as Aysola sings to her newborn son and reminds herself that her journey continues, even though her life has been joyfully upended by her children’s arrival.
One thread runs through all her reflections, however: “You have to blend it and unify it. It’s hard to bring things together, but it’s essential.”
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USA: "Getting Sentimental," Debut Recording by Chicago Jazz Vocalist Gayle Kolb, Due 8/31 from JeruJazz Records
"Getting Sentimental,"
Debut Recording by Chicago Jazz Vocalist
Gayle Kolb,
Set for 8/31 Release by JeruJazz Records
Kolb to Showcase Album,
Produced & Arranged by Bassist Dennis Carroll,
At Her 8/31 Chicago Jazz Festival Appearance
With Her CD Band:
Guitarist Bobby Broom,
Pianist Joey Skoch, Drummer George Fludas,
Trombonist Tom Garling, & Carroll
July 10, 2018
With the August 31 release of her debut recording Getting Sentimental, Chicago's Gayle Kolb makes a triumphant statement in song after a stretch of years away from music. Produced and arranged by acclaimed Chicago bassist Dennis Carrollfor JeruJazz Records, the album reveals Kolb's metamorphosis from a former nightclub headliner in Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and her hometown of Chicago into a compelling jazz artist in full command of her material and her gift.
Kolb will showcase the album on its release date during her Chicago Jazz Festival debut, performing with the same personnel heard on the recording: guitar great Bobby Broom, in whose trio Carroll has been a longtime member; Cleveland piano phenom Joey Skoch; ace trombonist Tom Garling of the Chicago Jazz Orchestra and Chicago Yestet; bassist Dennis Carroll: and the always-in-demand drummer George Fludas.
With her low tones and coolly relaxed phrasing, Kolb never settles for easy emotion. "Gayle sells a song without having to do the big dramatic stuff," says Carroll. "She is a subtle conveyor of story [with] real authenticity."
Among the tunes Carroll had Kolb cover was Ray Brown's rarely heard "Gravy Waltz," recorded by the Oscar Peterson Trio in the early '60s and with lyrics by talk show host and jazz pianist Steve Allen. "I had her go toe to toe, back and forth, with [Broom]," says Carroll. "It was real old school."
Kolb turns in a thoughtful version of "Two for the Road" featuring a smoldering trombone solo, and a bright but pensive reading of Marcos Valle's "If You Went Away," performed in a medium-tempo arrangement featuring Skoch on electric piano.
Another highlight is a beautifully restrained rendition of Jimmy Webb's masterpiece, "Wichita Lineman," recorded not long after the death of its beloved interpreter, Glen Campbell. Kolb had sung the song early in her career, when she mixed a lot of country and pop into her sets.
Gayle Kolb was born and raised in the southwestern Chicago suburb of Oak Lawn, where her father served as mayor for nearly three decades. She studied piano throughout her childhood, and later sang in the high school choir.
Relocating to Los Angeles in the early 1970s, she met the keyboardist and vocalist Mel Norfleet, who became her mentor and urged her to go hear Lorez Alexandria. Attending a show by the Chicago-born Alexandria, Kolb experienced a kind of epiphany. "Lorez was unbelievable," she says. "She spoke the lyrics, pronounced them, and you believed every word. I realized that that was what I wanted to learn and accomplish with my music."
Though Kolb did mostly commercial singing during engagements at the Hyatt and Bel-Air hotels, she discovered that when she inserted a jazz classic like "Midnight Sun" into her set, she drew the crowd in. (Kolb has been compared to such cool-school singers as Peggy Lee and June Christie, but says her primary influences were actually Sarah Vaughan, Carmen McRae, and Joe Williams.)
After moving back to Chicago in 1974, Kolb was contracted to work five nights a week in a suburban showroom, a gig that lasted four years and gave her the opportunity to take her show to Las Vegas. Back in the Windy City, she was asked to fill in for Lainie Kazan, the theater and TV star.
Eventually Kolb became fed up with commercial singing and quit the music business to devote herself to her family. She also found satisfying work as an interior designer. But jazz beckoned in the early 2000s. Newly single, Kolb reached out to musician friends and sat in at jam sessions, getting her chops back and learning tunes again. Singing before audiences after all her time away proved "difficult and scary," she says.
Having seen the highly regarded Carroll (pictured above with Kolb) in performances in Chicago and admired his work with singers, Kolb called him out of the blue for advice on reentering the music world -- or not. "I knew he would tell me the truth about my singing," she says. "He would tell me if I should go home. I was ready for that."
During her afternoon "audition" at his house, Carroll had Kolb sing songs at extended lengths and also scat -- something she had done very little of. "I wanted to see how much jazz she had in her," Carroll says. She passed all tests with flying colors, and it didn't take him long to make a decision. "We can do a CD," he told her after seven minutes, by his estimation.
Photogrpahy: Suzanne Plunkett
Media Contact:
Terri Hinte
510-234-8781
hudba@sbcglobal.net
terrihinte.com
510-234-8781
hudba@sbcglobal.net
terrihinte.com
USA: Guitarist Denny Jiosa explores the sensuality of Latin jazz fusion on "Mueve Tu Cuerpo"
Guitarist Denny Jiosa explores the sensuality
of Latin jazz fusion on “Mueve Tu Cuerpo”
The July 27 album release moves more than just bodies with the emotional radio single, “Missing You,” serving as testament.
NASHVILLE (23 July 2018): Four-time Grammy nominee Denny Jiosa sees parallels between the curvaceous body of the guitar and the human body. Indulging his passion for “sexy” Latin music, the jazz guitar slinger uses his electric and nylon-string guitar bodies to get people to move their body as well as expressively stir emotions on his eighth album, “Mueve Tu Cuerpo,” which drops July 27 on the Sonic Canvas Records/BFD imprint. Radio is already getting a taste with the evocative first single, “Missing You,” one of eleven songs Jiosa penned and produced for the collection.
Jiosa endeavored to craft an upbeat Latin-influenced, jazz-rooted album that would get people to move and grab attention via an exciting blend of musical styles. But he also wanted to go deeper, “shy away from the norm” and touch people emotionally. Beneath the energizing layers of exotic Latin percussion that create lusty rhythms and sensual grooves emerge moving harmonies and rousing melodies that resonate. Whether he’s furiously strumming impassioned nylon-string guitar rhythms, precisely picking lyrical phrases and bending extended notes, or intensely issuing scorched earth electric guitar pyrotechnics, Jiosa’s deft fretwork establishes and maintains a commanding presence throughout the recording.
“‘Mueve Tu Cuerpo’ is about what music does to get people to move. I wanted this to be an exciting, compelling and expressive blend, tapping into my huge passion for Latin music. I love the sounds, rhythms and sexiness of Latin music, which I blended with jazz rhythms, lines and harmonies. My intention from the outset was to reach a broad scope of listeners with this album. Guitar is one of the most expressive and sexy instruments. Whether I’m playing nylon string to electric guitar with an edge, it’s about moving people emotionally. If you can move people emotionally with an instrumental, then you’ve accomplished something,” said the Nashville-based Jiosa.
More than just sultry enticements to body movement or coaxing emotional responses, “Mueve Tu Cuerpo” also transmits meaningful messages. “Missing You” ruminates on the absence of Jiosa’s loved ones who have passed, such as his desire for his parents to be here to see their grandkids and hear his music. Alluring and mystical, “Dance In Heaven” contains the gut string guitarwork of multiple Grammy nominee Phil Keaggy. The festive, gospel-funk cut “Selah, Love Each Other,” featuring drummer Chester Thompson (Genesis, Frank Zappa), pays tribute to Jiosa’s late bassist, Chris Kent. John Santos contributes lead vocals to “Freedom Tower,” a song about the historic Miami structure that still stands as a landmark for Cubans who fled to the US in the 1960s and were processed at that location. The atmospheric meditation “From The Fire” appeared in the Christian film “Believe: The Misfit Pawn” a couple years ago and addresses embracing “the fire” we face in our lives.
Jiosa developed his brand of guitar play that borrows from jazz, rock, blues and R&B while living in Los Angeles where he studied under the tutelage of innovative guitarist Frank Gamble (Chick Corea). He dropped his solo debut, “Moving Pictures,” in 1995. Subsequent collections spawned a string of singles that proliferated the radio charts. Jiosa’s diverse body of work includes roles as a producer, engineer, mixer and/or guitarist for artists such as Yolanda Adams, Kirk Whalum, Take 6, Ben Tankard, Philip Bailey and Crystal Gayle. “Mueve Tu Cuerpo” is his first album in ten years. For more information, please visit http://jiosa.com.
Jiosa’s “Mueve Tu Cuerpo” contains the following songs:
“Fumarlo Bebe”
“Mueve Tu Cuerpo”
“Missing You”
“Dance In Heaven”
“Abre La Puerta”
“Selah, Love Each Other”
“The Gift”
“Freedom Tower”
“Backroads”
“From The Fire”
“Embracing The Fire” (remix)
Sunday, July 29, 2018
BRAZIL: Brazilian power trio DIALETO releases new album LIVE WITH DAVID CROSS (ex-King Crimson)
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