Posted on: December 13, 2011
This 21-year-old singer has “it.”
Plain Gold Ring
Explosively controlled jazz. Volcanic scat and soul. She bobs and weaves and falls victim to the depths of her emotional possession, as all great artists do. But she rises from those depths and expresses the journey upward and outward, without losing her courage or her conviction.
Aside from her wonderful voice, running parallel with it, she moves in interesting, idiosyncratic ways to her own song. A refreshing change from all too many pop singers who dance in cookie cutter ways, pushed into narrow corporate forms to look like every other pop singer. Joy Williams of The Civil Wars is similar in her physical originality.
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Kimbra Johnson was born in New Zealand, grew up there, but now makes her home in Australia.…
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Posted on: March 28, 2010
Hiromi Uehara.
She’s a dervish on the piano. She dances with it, tweaks and cajoles the notes, the rhythm, the beat. There are few performers with such a developed and idiosyncratic relationship with their musical instrument, and few who exhibit so much joy in performance. She makes music, the act of making music, physical, kinetic, electric.
NPR has a story and a good video up on its website showing her extraordinary technique.
Born in Japan in 1979, Hiromi later studied at the Berklee College of Music in Boston. She has played with several legends of the Jazz world, including Stanley Clarke and Chick Corea. Though known for her unusually high energy at times on stage, in this performance, she exhibits restraint, respect and devotion to her friend and mentor, the great Oscar Peterson, who passed away in 2007.…
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Posted on: May 14, 2009
Ella Fitzgerald. Photo by Carl Van Vechten. 1940
First to see. Like Billie Holiday and Benny Goodman. 1933. Debut to beat the band. To be there. To be not square there. Ella singing scat with Dizzy in the 40s. Using her voice like a horn, playing with it, like a mad cat running up and down a tree. Running up and down and all over town.
Billie wrote a lot of songs. A lot of people don’t know that. Or care. They just want to hear her sing. And, maybe feel like they’re cool for liking her, knowing about her. Yeah, it’s cool if you’re hip without pushing it. A Zen thing. A Taoist dream thing. Like, you gotta float and move fast while you’re standing still.…
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