Kavita Shah — Visions
°♠° Toto impozantní debutové album ohlašuje příchod nápadně originální, globálně smýšlející zpěvačky / skladatelky, na světovou scénu. This formidable debut album heralds the arrival of a strikingly original, globally minded vocalist/composer. Co-produced by Lionel Loueke, Visions combines a jazz quintet with the Indian tablas and West African kora.
°♠° Shah plays regularly in New York venues such as Joe's Pub, Cornelia Street Cafe, Rubin Museum, National Jazz Museum in Harlem, Bar Next Door, 55 Bar, Shapeshifter Lab, Minton's Playhouse, and NuBlu. She has performed as a leader at The Kennedy Center (DC), Philadelphia Museum of Art, Vermont Jazz Center, and Paris' Sunset/Sunside. Shah has collaborated with Sheila Jordan, Cecile McLorin Salvant, Peter Eldridge, Steve Wilson, Lionel Loueke, Linda Oh, Rogerio Boccato, Pierre de Bethmann, Yacouba Sissoko, Stephen Cellucci, and Samir Chatterjee.
Recommended if you like: Esperanza Spalding, Gretchen Parlato, Lionel Loueke
Location: New York City, U.S.
Album release: September 15, 2014
Record Label: Inner Circle Music/naïve jazz
Duration: 62:01
Tracks:
01. Sodade (feat. Lionel Loueke) 5:56
02. Visions 5:57
03. Little Green 5:48
04. Tabla Interlude 0:44
05. Paper Planes (feat. Steve Wilson) 5:02
06. Triste (feat. Steve Wilson) 5:14
07. Moray 5:56
08. Deluge (feat. Steve Wilson) 5:09
09. Oju Oba (feat. Lionel Loueke) 4:21
10. My Time Is When 5:12
11. Rag Desh: Alaap 2:15
12. Rag Desh: Teentaal Gat 3:03
13. Rag Desh: Meltdown 3:09
14. Sodade Postlude 1:10
15. When... (Bonus Track) 3:11
Credits:
→ Kavita Shah (voice, co-producer, arrangements)
→ Lionel Loueke (guitar/vocals, co-producer)
→ Steve Wilson (sax, flute)
→ Yacouba Sissoko (kora)
→ Michael Valeanu (guitar)
→ Steve Newcomb (piano)
→ Linda Oh (bass)
→ Guilhem Flouzat (drums)
→ Stephen Cellucci (tabla)
→ Rogerio Boccato (percussion)
→ Miho Hazama (conductor)
→ Curtis Stewart (violin)
→ Tomoko Omura (violin)
→ Nick Revel (viola)
→ Will Martina (cello)
° Co-Produced by Loueke,
° Album Combines Jazz Quintet
° with Indian Tablas and West African Kora
Þ This formidable debut album heralds the arrival of a strikingly original, globally minded vocalist/composer. Co-produced by Lionel Loueke, Visions combines a jazz quintet with the Indian tablas and West African kora.
Þ A vivid self-portrait in mosaic form, Kavita Shah's Visions (available May 27 on Greg Osby's Inner Circle Music) heralds the arrival of a strikingly original, globally minded new voice. The gifted vocalist/composer brings together a rich variety of musical, cultural, and personal influences into a formidable debut album that combines a jazz quintet with Indian tablas and the West African kora.
____________________________________________________________________
Kavita Shah: VISIONS T RACK BY TRACK LISTING
Þ (All songs arranged by Kavita Shah, except “Deluge,” arranged by Kavita Shah & Stephen Newcomb.)
1. SODADE (Amandio Cabral & Luis Morais) — ft. Lionel Loueke
This morna from Cape Verde speaks about a sodade, or feeling of longing, for one's homeland. One heart-wrenching line states, almost casually: “If you write me, I will write you / if you forget me, I will forget you.” This arrangement revolves around a percussive guitar ostinato, played by Lionel Loueke, adding in tablas, voice, kora, rhythm section, string quartet, and multiple vocal layers as the song progresses, thus magnifying and complicating the sentiment of sodade.
Soloists: Yacouba Sissoko (kora), Lionel Loueke (guitar), Kavita Shah (voice), Language: Cape Verdean Creole
2. VISIONS (Stevie Wonder)
Þ This was the first song I arranged for tablas, and hence the “Visions” project was born. The word “visions” itself represents the musical concept of the album: to create a panorama of diverse musical and personal experiences, and to share that with others, hopefully inspiring new ways of seeing. The original melody and lyrics of the song were so powerful that I wanted to keep them intact, reframing them in my own “words”, so to speak. This arrangement is characterized by: a drum-and-bass, tabla-driven groove; a dissonant minor 2nd between the bass line and verse's melody; a unconventionally re-harmonized bridge; modulating time signatures; a piano solo repeated over 8 bars (as if the song were stuck there in time), and a form that concludes the song on its bridge (intentionally on the words “all things have an ending.”)
Soloist: Stephen Newcomb (piano)
3. LITTLE GREEN (Joni Mitchell)
Þ This beautiful ballad is supposedly about Joni Mitchell's giving up her daughter for adoption. Despite the despair present, there is a lot of hope in this song. I actually wrote this arrangement in less than 30 minutes, while on deadline for a concert (it's amazing how sometimes, in those moments, we are able to conjure up inspiration from deep wells that we otherwise don't have access to). The piano ostinato at the beginning is intended to be like a toy box, a bit muted and clumsy, and the kora here brings out that sense of childlike wonder and exploration (in contrast to the bluesy, less delicate chorus).
Soloists: Yacouba Sissoko (kora), Stephen Newcomb (piano)
4. TABLA INTERLUDE
Þ This interlude was a spontaneous improvisation in the studio by Stephen Cellucci, playing off the concept of a tihai (or pattern of threes).
5. PAPER PLANES (Thomas Wesley Pentz, M.I.A., et. al.) — ft. Steve Wilson
Þ The tablas begin in a meter of 15 with a pitched ostinato that hints at the melody line. The simple melody and outrageous lyrics (speaking about counterfeiting and murder) lend themselves to this tongue-in-cheek arrangement. Instead of trying to imitate M.I.A.'s cavalier vocals, I wanted to ironically sing sweetly in a three-part harmony. The solo section unleashes the virtuosic power of young French guitarist Michael Valeanu and veteran alto saxophonist Steve Wilson, both of whom use fast, even chaotic, Eastern-sounding lines, going further and further “out” as the solo section progresses.
Soloists: Michael Valeanu (guitar), Steve Wilson (soprano sax)
6. TRISTE (Antônio Carlos Jobim) — ft. Steve Wilson
Þ This arrangement is a complete reharmonization of the Jobim classic “Triste,” which I arrived at by sitting at the piano with the melody and organically seeing where my ear would lead me. The modern, laid back groove harkens an R&B flavor, and features Steve Wilson on alto flute.
Soloists: Kavita Shah (voice), Steve Wilson (alto flute); Language: Portuguese
7. MORAY (Kavita Shah)
Þ * Recipient of the ASCAP Herb Alpert Young Jazz Composers Award, 2012
This song was named after Moray, an Incan ruin in Peru's Sacred Valley made up of terraced, concentric circles. I first visited it in 2004 while studying Incan architecture in Peru, and it immediately struck me as a magical site. While visiting it in 2011, I sat in its center and began composing this melody. I then explored the idea of concentric circles in the composition, stretching the melody simultaneously in two directions, while complicating the harmony through the development of the tune. This track shows off two soloists for the first time on Visions: bassist Linda Oh and drummer Guilhem Flouzat, who plays over a challenging passage of displaced hits by the rhythm section.
Þ The lyrics here were inspired by Pablo Neruda's epic poem “Las Alturas de Macchu Picchu,” and they say: “Where are the Indians of the valley? / Where are the Indians of the sea? / Where are they and where have they gone? / Where are they and where could they be?”
Soloists: Linda Oh (bass), Guilhem Flouzat (drums), Language: Spanish
8. DELUGE (Wayne Shorter & Kavita Shah) — ft. Steve Wilson
Þ Wayne Shorter is perhaps my biggest musical and compositional influence. The lyrics to “Deluge” came to me naturally one day (while I was actually trying to write lyrics to another Shorter tune!), and are very personal for me, as they deal with finding out about my father's death while.
____________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________
Þ Visions interweaves Shah's multicultural background (she's a native New Yorker of Indian descent fluent in Spanish, Portuguese, and French) with her wide-ranging musical tastes (reared on 90s hip-hop, Afro-Cuban music, and bossa nova, she studied jazz voice and classical piano) and her fascination with ethnomusicology (which she studied at Harvard). The album was co-produced by the renowned Benin-born guitarist Lionel Loueke, a kindred spirit who shares the singer's cohesive view of a multi-hued musical experience.
Þ "My experience of diaspora has not exactly been linear, but more like a kaleidoscope. So musically, I wanted to bring together different elements that I love, and combine them in a way that may be surprising to others but makes sense to me," Shah says. "We have one sound," adds Loueke. "You listen to the album from the beginning to the end, and even if the textures are different, it has a unity."
Þ Shah's own cultural heritage pointed to some unexpected directions. Her paternal grandfather moved from Mumbai to New York in the 1940s, a full generation before immigration from South Asia became common. After witnessing the birth of the United Nations, he returned to India as the first publisher to bring American books to the country, and Shah's father later retraced his path to New York to attend college. Shah's mother was one of 13 children, born to a father who insisted on educating his daughters rather than simply marrying them off; music, seen as a distraction, was forbidden.
Þ "I didn't grow up in a traditional household," Shah recalls. "My parents wanted to expose me to music, an opportunity they didn't have growing up, but not just to Hindi film songs or Indian classical music. They immigrated to New York in the 1970s, so there was a lot of pop in the house: The Beatles, Michael Jackson, Frank Sinatra." Both sides of that early musical diversity are represented on Visions: Shah sings Joni Mitchell's "Little Green" and Stevie Wonder's "Visions," while one of her first collaborators on the project was tabla player Stephen Cellucci. The two met while working on tabla virtuoso Samir Chatterjee's project "Rabi Thakur."
Þ Fourteen musicians from around the world ultimately contributed to breathing life into Shah's Visions, including keyboardist Stephen Newcomb, guitarist Michael Valeanu, bassist Linda Oh, drummer Guilhem Flouzat, percussionist Rogério Boccato, and a string quartet conducted by Miho Hazama. The album follows an engaging
narrative sweep, tracing the cycle of a day or, from a more melancholy angle, stages of grief (Shah's father died when she was 18). But through Shah's restless searching, it possesses a geographic as well as emotional sweep, made cohesive by her singular, prodigiously confident vision.
Þ "I haven't been so excited about a project like this in a long time," states Loueke. "Kavita is a real, true musician. She's a great singer, but the way she writes music, she's not really thinking just about the voice. It sounds like she could be a horn player, a saxophone player."
Þ Shah spent her childhood with the radio dial parked on HOT 97, New York's leading hip-hop station, which is echoed in her tabla-driven cover of British rapper M.I.A's hit "Paper Planes." Perhaps her most formative musical experience came at the age of 10 when she joined the Young People's Chorus of New York City, an award-winning youth chorus with whom she regularly performed in more than 15 languages in venues like Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center.
Þ It was in the YPC where Shah was first exposed to jazz, and it stuck. "We sang everything from standards to opera to pop to folk music to contemporary pieces by major composers like Meredith Monk," Shah recalls. "For me, that all these types of music could co-exist was quite normal, and in a way, I've been trying to replicate that experience ever since."
Þ Shah majored in Latin American Studies at Harvard, living abroad in Peru and then Brazil, where she conducted research on Afro-Brazilian music in a Bahian favela. That period is reflected in her rhythmically intoxicating duo with Lionel Loueke on Edil Pacheco/P. C. Pinheiro's "Oju Oba" as well as in her own composition "Moray" (winner of ASCAP's Young Jazz Composers Award), named for an Incan archeological site and inspired by Pablo Neruda's epic poem "Las Alturas de Macchu Picchu."
Þ After college, Shah found herself working day jobs at nonprofits like Human Rights Watch until she received advice from an unexpected, brassy guardian angel: legendary vocalist Sheila Jordan. "I was on my way to work when the subway doors opened," Shah recalls, "and there was Sheila Jordan in front of me. At that time, I didn't have a mentor in jazz and I was a little lost. In 15 minutes on the train, Sheila basically gave me all of her mantras for life — she took me in and really encouraged me."
Þ With Jordan's support, Shah went on to receive her Masters in Jazz Voice from Manhattan School of Music while studying privately with Theo Bleckmann, Peter Eldridge, Steve Wilson, and Jim McNeely. Wilson's supple reed playing is featured on three tracks on Visions, while McNeely proved instrumental in nurturing Shah's innovative arrangements.
Þ While at MSM, Shah was named by DownBeat as Best Graduate Jazz Vocalist, and she has since become an active member of New York's thriving jazz community, performing regularly at such venues as Cornelia Street Café, Bar Next Door, 55 Bar, Shapeshifter Lab, Kitano, and Minton's Playhouse.
Þ The final piece of the Visions puzzle fell into place from passion rather than experience. Shah's love for the music of master Malian musicians like Ali Farka Touré and Toumani Diabaté inspired her to call kora player Yacouba Sissoko, who eagerly responded to the challenge of her musical mélange.
Þ "It is so against who I am to pick just one style of music," Shah says. "Being a global citizen in the 21st century means having a somewhat disjointed life — scattered memories, connections, and experiences that can be enriching but also isolating. Visions is my small universe of all the parts that make me whole."
Þ Shah had never met Lionel Loueke when she called on him to co-produce the album, but she recognized a fellow traveler in his own globetrotting sonic collage. "Lionel went above and beyond as a co-producer. He and I share the same vision for how we approach music, so I think there was an automatic trust, respect, and appreciation there. He has a really beautiful spirit and we formed a special relationship; he's been incredibly generous and supportive of my music."
Þ "I see myself as a cultural interlocutor. A singer can play an almost mystical role, connecting these different elements on stage with an audience through the human voice, through words. With the Visions project, it's amazing to see the Joni Mitchell fan who has never before seen a kora standing next to the hardcore jazz fan who would not expect to hear tablas on a Wayne Shorter tune. I hope that people find something familiar in the music that draws them in, but then discover something new that might change, even for a second, how they see the world."
Kavita Shah · Visions
Inner Circle Music · Release Date: May 27, 2014
For more information on Kavita Shah, please visit: KavitaShahMusic.com
For media information, please contact:
DL Media · 610-667-0501
Matthew Jurasek ·
Don Lucoff ·
Serving the Finest in Jazz Since 1988
Information and press materials (including album covers, promotional photos
and bios) on all DL Media artists can be found at our website: dlmediamusic.com
NOTES:
Album Notes
Þ "Kavita is a musician's singer. She thinks like an instrumentalist, always taking risks and searching for new levels of understanding. Her music defies categorization." — Steve Wilson, jazz saxophonist
Þ "Kavita Shah has set forth on a beautiful journey into uncharted waters. Her songwriting and her voice merge centuries and continents into music which touches antiquity and leads into the future in the same moment.” — Robert Sadin, Grammy award-winning producer
Þ A vivid self-portrait in mosaic form, Kavita Shah's Visions (available May 27 on Greg Osby's Inner Circle Music) heralds the arrival of a strikingly original, globally minded new voice. The gifted vocalist/composer brings together a rich variety of musical, cultural, and personal influences into a formidable debut album that combines a jazz quintet with Indian tablas and the West African kora.
Þ Visions interweaves Shah's multicultural background (she's a native New Yorker of Indian descent fluent in Spanish, Portuguese, and French) with her wide-ranging musical tastes (reared on 90s hip-hop, Afro-Cuban music, and bossa nova, she studied jazz voice and classical piano) and her fascination with ethnomusicology (which she studied at Harvard). The album was co-produced by the renowned Benin-born guitarist Lionel Loueke, a kindred spirit who shares the singer's cohesive view of a multi-hued musical experience.
Þ "My experience of diaspora has not exactly been linear, but more like a kaleidoscope. So musically, I wanted to bring together different elements that I love, and combine them in a way that may be surprising to others but makes sense to me," Shah says. "We have one sound," adds Loueke. "You listen to the album from the beginning to the end, and even if the textures are different, it has a unity."
Þ Shah's own cultural heritage pointed to some unexpected directions. Her paternal grandfather moved from Mumbai to New York in the 1940s, a full generation before immigration from South Asia became common. After witnessing the birth of the United Nations, he returned to India as the first publisher to bring American books to the country, and Shah's father later retraced his path to New York to attend college. Shah's mother was one of 13 children, born to a father who insisted on educating his daughters rather than simply marrying them off; music, seen as a distraction, was forbidden.
Þ "I didn't grow up in a traditional household," Shah recalls. "My parents wanted to expose me to music, an opportunity they didn't have growing up, but not just to Hindi film songs or Indian classical music. They immigrated to New York in the 1970s, so there was a lot of pop in the house: The Beatles, Michael Jackson, Frank Sinatra." Both sides of that early musical diversity are represented on Visions: Shah sings Joni Mitchell's "Little Green" and Stevie Wonder's "Visions," while one of her first collaborators on the project was tabla player Stephen Cellucci. The two met while working on tabla virtuoso Samir Chatterjee's project "Rabi Thakur."
Þ Fourteen musicians from around the world ultimately contributed to breathing life into Shah's Visions, including keyboardist Stephen Newcomb, guitarist Michael Valeanu, bassist Linda Oh, drummer Guilhem Flouzat, percussionist Rogério Boccato, and a string quartet conducted by Miho Hazama. The album follows an engaging narrative sweep, tracing the cycle of a day or, from a more melancholy angle, stages of grief (Shah's father died when she was 18). But through Shah's restless searching, it possesses a geographic as well as emotional sweep, made cohesive by her singular, prodigiously confident vision.
Þ "I haven't been so excited about a project like this in a long time," states Loueke. "Kavita is a real, true musician. She's a great singer, but the way she writes music, she's not really thinking just about the voice. It sounds like she could be a horn player, a saxophone player."
Þ Shah spent her childhood with the radio dial parked on HOT 97, New York's leading hip-hop station, which is echoed in her tabla-driven cover of British rapper M.I.A's hit "Paper Planes." Perhaps her most formative musical experience came at the age of 10 when she joined the Young People's Chorus of New York City, an award-winning youth chorus with whom she regularly performed in more than 15 languages in venues like Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center. It was in the YPC where Shah was first exposed to jazz, and it stuck. "We sang everything from standards to opera to pop to folk music to contemporary pieces by major composers like Meredith Monk," Shah recalls. "For me, that all these types of music could co-exist was quite normal, and in a way, I've been trying to replicate that experience ever since."
Þ Shah majored in Latin American Studies at Harvard, living abroad in Peru and then Brazil, where she conducted research on Afro-Brazilian music in a Bahian favela. That period is reflected in her rhythmically intoxicating duo with Lionel Loueke on Edil Pacheco/P. C. Pinheiro's "Oju Oba" as well as in her own composition "Moray" (winner of ASCAP's Young Jazz Composers Award), named for an Incan archeological site and inspired by Pablo Neruda's epic poem "Las Alturas de Macchu Picchu."
Þ After college, Shah found herself working day jobs at nonprofits like Human Rights Watch until she received advice from an unexpected, brassy guardian angel: legendary vocalist Sheila Jordan. "I was on my way to work when the subway doors opened," Shah recalls, "and there was Sheila Jordan in front of me. At that time, I didn't have a mentor in jazz and I was a little lost. In 15 minutes on the train, Sheila basically gave me all of her mantras for life — she took me in and really encouraged me."
Þ With Jordan's support, Shah went on to receive her Masters in Jazz Voice from Manhattan School of Music while studying privately with Theo Bleckmann, Peter Eldridge, Steve Wilson, and Jim McNeely. Wilson's supple reed playing is featured on three tracks on Visions, while McNeely proved instrumental in nurturing Shah's innovative arrangements. While at MSM, Shah was named by DownBeat as Best Graduate Jazz Vocalist, and she has since become an active member of New York's thriving jazz community, performing regularly at such venues as Cornelia Street Café, Þ Bar Next Door, 55 Bar, Shapeshifter Lab, Kitano, and Minton's Playhouse.
The final piece of the Visions puzzle fell into place from passion rather than experience. Shah's love for the music of master Malian musicians like Ali Farka Touré and Toumani Diabaté inspired her to call kora player Yacouba Sissoko, who eagerly responded to the challenge of her musical mélange.
Þ "It is so against who I am to pick just one style of music," Shah says. "Being a global citizen in the 21st century means having a somewhat disjointed life — scattered memories, connections, and experiences that can be enriching but also isolating. Visions is my small universe of all the parts that make me whole."
Þ Shah had never met Lionel Loueke when she called on him to co-produce the album, but she recognized a fellow traveler in his own globetrotting sonic collage. "Lionel went above and beyond as a co-producer. He and I share the same vision for how we approach music, so I think there was an automatic trust, respect, and appreciation there. He has a really beautiful spirit and we formed a special relationship; he's been incredibly generous and supportive of my music."
Þ "I see myself as a cultural interlocutor. A singer can play an almost mystical role, connecting these different elements on stage with an audience through the human voice, through words. With the Visions project, it's amazing to see the Joni Mitchell fan who has never before seen a kora standing next to the hardcore jazz fan who would not expect to hear tablas on a Wayne Shorter tune. I hope that people find something familiar in the music that draws them in, but then discover something new that might change, even for a second, how they see the world."
ABOUT:
Þ Hailed by Downbeat Magazine as the "Best Graduate Jazz Vocalist" (2012) and winner of the ASCAP Herb Alpert Young Jazz Composers Award (2013), Kavita Shah is gaining a reputation as a visionary young singer, composer, and arranger. A native New Yorker of Indian origin fluent in Spanish, Portuguese, and French, Ms. Shah incorporates elements of Indian, Brazilian, and Malian music into her jazz-based repertoire. Her debut CD VISIONS–produced by Benin-born jazz guitarist Lionel Loueke — combines the sounds of the traditional Indian tablas and West African kora with those of a jazz quintet.
Þ "Visions," which includes special guests Loueke (guitar, vocals), Steve Wilson (saxophone, flute), and Rogerio Boccato (percussion), was released to critical acclaim in the US & Canada on May 27, 2014 on Greg Osby's Inner Circle Music label. (It will be released September 15, 2014 in Europe & Japan on the French label Naïve).
Ms. Shah grew up in Manhattan, studying classical piano from age 5 and performing regularly at Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center from age 10 as a member of the award-winning Young People's Chorus of NYC. She was a semifinalist in the 2011 Voicingers International Jazz Competition held in Zory, Poland, and she has since performed as a leader in France, Belgium, and Germany. She plays frequently in the New York metro area at such venues as National Jazz Museum in Harlem, Rubin Museum, Cornelia Street Café, Bar Next Door, 55 Bar, Shapeshifter Lab, Minton's Playhouse, NuBlu, Nuyorican Poets Café, University Club, Harvard Club, New Jersey Performing Arts Center, and in the greater Northeast at The Kennedy Center (DC) and Vermont Jazz Center. Ms. Shah has had the pleasure of collaborating with such artists as Sheila Jordan, Peter Eldridge, Steve Wilson, Lionel Loueke, Linda Oh, Gilad Hekselman, Rogerio Boccato, Pierre de Bethmann, Yacouba Sissoko, Stephen Cellucci, and Samir Chatterjee, among others.
Þ In addition to the "Visions" project, Ms. Shah leads the Brazil Trio, a jazz quintet, and the 3rd World Orquestra, a 13-piece ensemble with tabla, kora, rhythm section, and strings. She regularly works with contemporary composers and has premiered over 12 works in ensembles ranging from chamber groups to big band to jazz philharmonic. She is a member of the Steve Newcomb Orchestra ("Caterpillar Chronicles," Listen/Hear Collective 2012), and is the lead voice for tabla virtuoso Samir Chatterjee's project "Rabi Thakur."
Þ Ms. Shah received her Master's in Jazz Voice from Manhattan School of Music, where she studied with Theo Bleckmann, Peter Eldridge, Steve Wilson, and Jim McNeely. She holds a B.A. from Harvard College in Latin American Studies, where she was the recipient of the Cultural Agents Thesis Prize and the Kenneth D. Maxwell Prize in Brazilian Studies for her ethnomusicology research on contemporary Afro-Brazilian music and politics.
Label: http://en.naive.fr/
Website: http://www.kavitashahmusic.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/cantakavita
YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhBfdg93cijvmQweDrvw95RnT1nqMw8Nj
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/KavitaShahMusic
Press: Don Lucoff: 610-667-0501,
CD Baby: http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/kavitashah
DL Media Music: http://dlmediamusic.com/artist/kavita-shah/
____________________________________________________________
°♠° Toto impozantní debutové album ohlašuje příchod nápadně originální, globálně smýšlející zpěvačky / skladatelky, na světovou scénu. This formidable debut album heralds the arrival of a strikingly original, globally minded vocalist/composer. Co-produced by Lionel Loueke, Visions combines a jazz quintet with the Indian tablas and West African kora.
°♠° Shah plays regularly in New York venues such as Joe's Pub, Cornelia Street Cafe, Rubin Museum, National Jazz Museum in Harlem, Bar Next Door, 55 Bar, Shapeshifter Lab, Minton's Playhouse, and NuBlu. She has performed as a leader at The Kennedy Center (DC), Philadelphia Museum of Art, Vermont Jazz Center, and Paris' Sunset/Sunside. Shah has collaborated with Sheila Jordan, Cecile McLorin Salvant, Peter Eldridge, Steve Wilson, Lionel Loueke, Linda Oh, Rogerio Boccato, Pierre de Bethmann, Yacouba Sissoko, Stephen Cellucci, and Samir Chatterjee.
Recommended if you like: Esperanza Spalding, Gretchen Parlato, Lionel Loueke
Location: New York City, U.S.
Album release: September 15, 2014
Record Label: Inner Circle Music/naïve jazz
Duration: 62:01
Tracks:
01. Sodade (feat. Lionel Loueke) 5:56
02. Visions 5:57
03. Little Green 5:48
04. Tabla Interlude 0:44
05. Paper Planes (feat. Steve Wilson) 5:02
06. Triste (feat. Steve Wilson) 5:14
07. Moray 5:56
08. Deluge (feat. Steve Wilson) 5:09
09. Oju Oba (feat. Lionel Loueke) 4:21
10. My Time Is When 5:12
11. Rag Desh: Alaap 2:15
12. Rag Desh: Teentaal Gat 3:03
13. Rag Desh: Meltdown 3:09
14. Sodade Postlude 1:10
15. When... (Bonus Track) 3:11
Credits:
→ Kavita Shah (voice, co-producer, arrangements)
→ Lionel Loueke (guitar/vocals, co-producer)
→ Steve Wilson (sax, flute)
→ Yacouba Sissoko (kora)
→ Michael Valeanu (guitar)
→ Steve Newcomb (piano)
→ Linda Oh (bass)
→ Guilhem Flouzat (drums)
→ Stephen Cellucci (tabla)
→ Rogerio Boccato (percussion)
→ Miho Hazama (conductor)
→ Curtis Stewart (violin)
→ Tomoko Omura (violin)
→ Nick Revel (viola)
→ Will Martina (cello)
° Co-Produced by Loueke,
° Album Combines Jazz Quintet
° with Indian Tablas and West African Kora
Þ This formidable debut album heralds the arrival of a strikingly original, globally minded vocalist/composer. Co-produced by Lionel Loueke, Visions combines a jazz quintet with the Indian tablas and West African kora.
Þ A vivid self-portrait in mosaic form, Kavita Shah's Visions (available May 27 on Greg Osby's Inner Circle Music) heralds the arrival of a strikingly original, globally minded new voice. The gifted vocalist/composer brings together a rich variety of musical, cultural, and personal influences into a formidable debut album that combines a jazz quintet with Indian tablas and the West African kora.
____________________________________________________________________
Kavita Shah: VISIONS T RACK BY TRACK LISTING
Þ (All songs arranged by Kavita Shah, except “Deluge,” arranged by Kavita Shah & Stephen Newcomb.)
1. SODADE (Amandio Cabral & Luis Morais) — ft. Lionel Loueke
This morna from Cape Verde speaks about a sodade, or feeling of longing, for one's homeland. One heart-wrenching line states, almost casually: “If you write me, I will write you / if you forget me, I will forget you.” This arrangement revolves around a percussive guitar ostinato, played by Lionel Loueke, adding in tablas, voice, kora, rhythm section, string quartet, and multiple vocal layers as the song progresses, thus magnifying and complicating the sentiment of sodade.
Soloists: Yacouba Sissoko (kora), Lionel Loueke (guitar), Kavita Shah (voice), Language: Cape Verdean Creole
2. VISIONS (Stevie Wonder)
Þ This was the first song I arranged for tablas, and hence the “Visions” project was born. The word “visions” itself represents the musical concept of the album: to create a panorama of diverse musical and personal experiences, and to share that with others, hopefully inspiring new ways of seeing. The original melody and lyrics of the song were so powerful that I wanted to keep them intact, reframing them in my own “words”, so to speak. This arrangement is characterized by: a drum-and-bass, tabla-driven groove; a dissonant minor 2nd between the bass line and verse's melody; a unconventionally re-harmonized bridge; modulating time signatures; a piano solo repeated over 8 bars (as if the song were stuck there in time), and a form that concludes the song on its bridge (intentionally on the words “all things have an ending.”)
Soloist: Stephen Newcomb (piano)
3. LITTLE GREEN (Joni Mitchell)
Þ This beautiful ballad is supposedly about Joni Mitchell's giving up her daughter for adoption. Despite the despair present, there is a lot of hope in this song. I actually wrote this arrangement in less than 30 minutes, while on deadline for a concert (it's amazing how sometimes, in those moments, we are able to conjure up inspiration from deep wells that we otherwise don't have access to). The piano ostinato at the beginning is intended to be like a toy box, a bit muted and clumsy, and the kora here brings out that sense of childlike wonder and exploration (in contrast to the bluesy, less delicate chorus).
Soloists: Yacouba Sissoko (kora), Stephen Newcomb (piano)
4. TABLA INTERLUDE
Þ This interlude was a spontaneous improvisation in the studio by Stephen Cellucci, playing off the concept of a tihai (or pattern of threes).
5. PAPER PLANES (Thomas Wesley Pentz, M.I.A., et. al.) — ft. Steve Wilson
Þ The tablas begin in a meter of 15 with a pitched ostinato that hints at the melody line. The simple melody and outrageous lyrics (speaking about counterfeiting and murder) lend themselves to this tongue-in-cheek arrangement. Instead of trying to imitate M.I.A.'s cavalier vocals, I wanted to ironically sing sweetly in a three-part harmony. The solo section unleashes the virtuosic power of young French guitarist Michael Valeanu and veteran alto saxophonist Steve Wilson, both of whom use fast, even chaotic, Eastern-sounding lines, going further and further “out” as the solo section progresses.
Soloists: Michael Valeanu (guitar), Steve Wilson (soprano sax)
6. TRISTE (Antônio Carlos Jobim) — ft. Steve Wilson
Þ This arrangement is a complete reharmonization of the Jobim classic “Triste,” which I arrived at by sitting at the piano with the melody and organically seeing where my ear would lead me. The modern, laid back groove harkens an R&B flavor, and features Steve Wilson on alto flute.
Soloists: Kavita Shah (voice), Steve Wilson (alto flute); Language: Portuguese
7. MORAY (Kavita Shah)
Þ * Recipient of the ASCAP Herb Alpert Young Jazz Composers Award, 2012
This song was named after Moray, an Incan ruin in Peru's Sacred Valley made up of terraced, concentric circles. I first visited it in 2004 while studying Incan architecture in Peru, and it immediately struck me as a magical site. While visiting it in 2011, I sat in its center and began composing this melody. I then explored the idea of concentric circles in the composition, stretching the melody simultaneously in two directions, while complicating the harmony through the development of the tune. This track shows off two soloists for the first time on Visions: bassist Linda Oh and drummer Guilhem Flouzat, who plays over a challenging passage of displaced hits by the rhythm section.
Þ The lyrics here were inspired by Pablo Neruda's epic poem “Las Alturas de Macchu Picchu,” and they say: “Where are the Indians of the valley? / Where are the Indians of the sea? / Where are they and where have they gone? / Where are they and where could they be?”
Soloists: Linda Oh (bass), Guilhem Flouzat (drums), Language: Spanish
8. DELUGE (Wayne Shorter & Kavita Shah) — ft. Steve Wilson
Þ Wayne Shorter is perhaps my biggest musical and compositional influence. The lyrics to “Deluge” came to me naturally one day (while I was actually trying to write lyrics to another Shorter tune!), and are very personal for me, as they deal with finding out about my father's death while.
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Þ Visions interweaves Shah's multicultural background (she's a native New Yorker of Indian descent fluent in Spanish, Portuguese, and French) with her wide-ranging musical tastes (reared on 90s hip-hop, Afro-Cuban music, and bossa nova, she studied jazz voice and classical piano) and her fascination with ethnomusicology (which she studied at Harvard). The album was co-produced by the renowned Benin-born guitarist Lionel Loueke, a kindred spirit who shares the singer's cohesive view of a multi-hued musical experience.
Þ "My experience of diaspora has not exactly been linear, but more like a kaleidoscope. So musically, I wanted to bring together different elements that I love, and combine them in a way that may be surprising to others but makes sense to me," Shah says. "We have one sound," adds Loueke. "You listen to the album from the beginning to the end, and even if the textures are different, it has a unity."
Þ Shah's own cultural heritage pointed to some unexpected directions. Her paternal grandfather moved from Mumbai to New York in the 1940s, a full generation before immigration from South Asia became common. After witnessing the birth of the United Nations, he returned to India as the first publisher to bring American books to the country, and Shah's father later retraced his path to New York to attend college. Shah's mother was one of 13 children, born to a father who insisted on educating his daughters rather than simply marrying them off; music, seen as a distraction, was forbidden.
Þ "I didn't grow up in a traditional household," Shah recalls. "My parents wanted to expose me to music, an opportunity they didn't have growing up, but not just to Hindi film songs or Indian classical music. They immigrated to New York in the 1970s, so there was a lot of pop in the house: The Beatles, Michael Jackson, Frank Sinatra." Both sides of that early musical diversity are represented on Visions: Shah sings Joni Mitchell's "Little Green" and Stevie Wonder's "Visions," while one of her first collaborators on the project was tabla player Stephen Cellucci. The two met while working on tabla virtuoso Samir Chatterjee's project "Rabi Thakur."
Þ Fourteen musicians from around the world ultimately contributed to breathing life into Shah's Visions, including keyboardist Stephen Newcomb, guitarist Michael Valeanu, bassist Linda Oh, drummer Guilhem Flouzat, percussionist Rogério Boccato, and a string quartet conducted by Miho Hazama. The album follows an engaging
narrative sweep, tracing the cycle of a day or, from a more melancholy angle, stages of grief (Shah's father died when she was 18). But through Shah's restless searching, it possesses a geographic as well as emotional sweep, made cohesive by her singular, prodigiously confident vision.
Þ "I haven't been so excited about a project like this in a long time," states Loueke. "Kavita is a real, true musician. She's a great singer, but the way she writes music, she's not really thinking just about the voice. It sounds like she could be a horn player, a saxophone player."
Þ Shah spent her childhood with the radio dial parked on HOT 97, New York's leading hip-hop station, which is echoed in her tabla-driven cover of British rapper M.I.A's hit "Paper Planes." Perhaps her most formative musical experience came at the age of 10 when she joined the Young People's Chorus of New York City, an award-winning youth chorus with whom she regularly performed in more than 15 languages in venues like Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center.
Þ It was in the YPC where Shah was first exposed to jazz, and it stuck. "We sang everything from standards to opera to pop to folk music to contemporary pieces by major composers like Meredith Monk," Shah recalls. "For me, that all these types of music could co-exist was quite normal, and in a way, I've been trying to replicate that experience ever since."
Þ Shah majored in Latin American Studies at Harvard, living abroad in Peru and then Brazil, where she conducted research on Afro-Brazilian music in a Bahian favela. That period is reflected in her rhythmically intoxicating duo with Lionel Loueke on Edil Pacheco/P. C. Pinheiro's "Oju Oba" as well as in her own composition "Moray" (winner of ASCAP's Young Jazz Composers Award), named for an Incan archeological site and inspired by Pablo Neruda's epic poem "Las Alturas de Macchu Picchu."
Þ After college, Shah found herself working day jobs at nonprofits like Human Rights Watch until she received advice from an unexpected, brassy guardian angel: legendary vocalist Sheila Jordan. "I was on my way to work when the subway doors opened," Shah recalls, "and there was Sheila Jordan in front of me. At that time, I didn't have a mentor in jazz and I was a little lost. In 15 minutes on the train, Sheila basically gave me all of her mantras for life — she took me in and really encouraged me."
Þ With Jordan's support, Shah went on to receive her Masters in Jazz Voice from Manhattan School of Music while studying privately with Theo Bleckmann, Peter Eldridge, Steve Wilson, and Jim McNeely. Wilson's supple reed playing is featured on three tracks on Visions, while McNeely proved instrumental in nurturing Shah's innovative arrangements.
Þ While at MSM, Shah was named by DownBeat as Best Graduate Jazz Vocalist, and she has since become an active member of New York's thriving jazz community, performing regularly at such venues as Cornelia Street Café, Bar Next Door, 55 Bar, Shapeshifter Lab, Kitano, and Minton's Playhouse.
Þ The final piece of the Visions puzzle fell into place from passion rather than experience. Shah's love for the music of master Malian musicians like Ali Farka Touré and Toumani Diabaté inspired her to call kora player Yacouba Sissoko, who eagerly responded to the challenge of her musical mélange.
Þ "It is so against who I am to pick just one style of music," Shah says. "Being a global citizen in the 21st century means having a somewhat disjointed life — scattered memories, connections, and experiences that can be enriching but also isolating. Visions is my small universe of all the parts that make me whole."
Þ Shah had never met Lionel Loueke when she called on him to co-produce the album, but she recognized a fellow traveler in his own globetrotting sonic collage. "Lionel went above and beyond as a co-producer. He and I share the same vision for how we approach music, so I think there was an automatic trust, respect, and appreciation there. He has a really beautiful spirit and we formed a special relationship; he's been incredibly generous and supportive of my music."
Þ "I see myself as a cultural interlocutor. A singer can play an almost mystical role, connecting these different elements on stage with an audience through the human voice, through words. With the Visions project, it's amazing to see the Joni Mitchell fan who has never before seen a kora standing next to the hardcore jazz fan who would not expect to hear tablas on a Wayne Shorter tune. I hope that people find something familiar in the music that draws them in, but then discover something new that might change, even for a second, how they see the world."
Kavita Shah · Visions
Inner Circle Music · Release Date: May 27, 2014
For more information on Kavita Shah, please visit: KavitaShahMusic.com
For media information, please contact:
DL Media · 610-667-0501
Matthew Jurasek ·
Don Lucoff ·
Serving the Finest in Jazz Since 1988
Information and press materials (including album covers, promotional photos
and bios) on all DL Media artists can be found at our website: dlmediamusic.com
NOTES:
Album Notes
Þ "Kavita is a musician's singer. She thinks like an instrumentalist, always taking risks and searching for new levels of understanding. Her music defies categorization." — Steve Wilson, jazz saxophonist
Þ "Kavita Shah has set forth on a beautiful journey into uncharted waters. Her songwriting and her voice merge centuries and continents into music which touches antiquity and leads into the future in the same moment.” — Robert Sadin, Grammy award-winning producer
Þ A vivid self-portrait in mosaic form, Kavita Shah's Visions (available May 27 on Greg Osby's Inner Circle Music) heralds the arrival of a strikingly original, globally minded new voice. The gifted vocalist/composer brings together a rich variety of musical, cultural, and personal influences into a formidable debut album that combines a jazz quintet with Indian tablas and the West African kora.
Þ Visions interweaves Shah's multicultural background (she's a native New Yorker of Indian descent fluent in Spanish, Portuguese, and French) with her wide-ranging musical tastes (reared on 90s hip-hop, Afro-Cuban music, and bossa nova, she studied jazz voice and classical piano) and her fascination with ethnomusicology (which she studied at Harvard). The album was co-produced by the renowned Benin-born guitarist Lionel Loueke, a kindred spirit who shares the singer's cohesive view of a multi-hued musical experience.
Þ "My experience of diaspora has not exactly been linear, but more like a kaleidoscope. So musically, I wanted to bring together different elements that I love, and combine them in a way that may be surprising to others but makes sense to me," Shah says. "We have one sound," adds Loueke. "You listen to the album from the beginning to the end, and even if the textures are different, it has a unity."
Þ Shah's own cultural heritage pointed to some unexpected directions. Her paternal grandfather moved from Mumbai to New York in the 1940s, a full generation before immigration from South Asia became common. After witnessing the birth of the United Nations, he returned to India as the first publisher to bring American books to the country, and Shah's father later retraced his path to New York to attend college. Shah's mother was one of 13 children, born to a father who insisted on educating his daughters rather than simply marrying them off; music, seen as a distraction, was forbidden.
Þ "I didn't grow up in a traditional household," Shah recalls. "My parents wanted to expose me to music, an opportunity they didn't have growing up, but not just to Hindi film songs or Indian classical music. They immigrated to New York in the 1970s, so there was a lot of pop in the house: The Beatles, Michael Jackson, Frank Sinatra." Both sides of that early musical diversity are represented on Visions: Shah sings Joni Mitchell's "Little Green" and Stevie Wonder's "Visions," while one of her first collaborators on the project was tabla player Stephen Cellucci. The two met while working on tabla virtuoso Samir Chatterjee's project "Rabi Thakur."
Þ Fourteen musicians from around the world ultimately contributed to breathing life into Shah's Visions, including keyboardist Stephen Newcomb, guitarist Michael Valeanu, bassist Linda Oh, drummer Guilhem Flouzat, percussionist Rogério Boccato, and a string quartet conducted by Miho Hazama. The album follows an engaging narrative sweep, tracing the cycle of a day or, from a more melancholy angle, stages of grief (Shah's father died when she was 18). But through Shah's restless searching, it possesses a geographic as well as emotional sweep, made cohesive by her singular, prodigiously confident vision.
Þ "I haven't been so excited about a project like this in a long time," states Loueke. "Kavita is a real, true musician. She's a great singer, but the way she writes music, she's not really thinking just about the voice. It sounds like she could be a horn player, a saxophone player."
Þ Shah spent her childhood with the radio dial parked on HOT 97, New York's leading hip-hop station, which is echoed in her tabla-driven cover of British rapper M.I.A's hit "Paper Planes." Perhaps her most formative musical experience came at the age of 10 when she joined the Young People's Chorus of New York City, an award-winning youth chorus with whom she regularly performed in more than 15 languages in venues like Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center. It was in the YPC where Shah was first exposed to jazz, and it stuck. "We sang everything from standards to opera to pop to folk music to contemporary pieces by major composers like Meredith Monk," Shah recalls. "For me, that all these types of music could co-exist was quite normal, and in a way, I've been trying to replicate that experience ever since."
Þ Shah majored in Latin American Studies at Harvard, living abroad in Peru and then Brazil, where she conducted research on Afro-Brazilian music in a Bahian favela. That period is reflected in her rhythmically intoxicating duo with Lionel Loueke on Edil Pacheco/P. C. Pinheiro's "Oju Oba" as well as in her own composition "Moray" (winner of ASCAP's Young Jazz Composers Award), named for an Incan archeological site and inspired by Pablo Neruda's epic poem "Las Alturas de Macchu Picchu."
Þ After college, Shah found herself working day jobs at nonprofits like Human Rights Watch until she received advice from an unexpected, brassy guardian angel: legendary vocalist Sheila Jordan. "I was on my way to work when the subway doors opened," Shah recalls, "and there was Sheila Jordan in front of me. At that time, I didn't have a mentor in jazz and I was a little lost. In 15 minutes on the train, Sheila basically gave me all of her mantras for life — she took me in and really encouraged me."
Þ With Jordan's support, Shah went on to receive her Masters in Jazz Voice from Manhattan School of Music while studying privately with Theo Bleckmann, Peter Eldridge, Steve Wilson, and Jim McNeely. Wilson's supple reed playing is featured on three tracks on Visions, while McNeely proved instrumental in nurturing Shah's innovative arrangements. While at MSM, Shah was named by DownBeat as Best Graduate Jazz Vocalist, and she has since become an active member of New York's thriving jazz community, performing regularly at such venues as Cornelia Street Café, Þ Bar Next Door, 55 Bar, Shapeshifter Lab, Kitano, and Minton's Playhouse.
The final piece of the Visions puzzle fell into place from passion rather than experience. Shah's love for the music of master Malian musicians like Ali Farka Touré and Toumani Diabaté inspired her to call kora player Yacouba Sissoko, who eagerly responded to the challenge of her musical mélange.
Þ "It is so against who I am to pick just one style of music," Shah says. "Being a global citizen in the 21st century means having a somewhat disjointed life — scattered memories, connections, and experiences that can be enriching but also isolating. Visions is my small universe of all the parts that make me whole."
Þ Shah had never met Lionel Loueke when she called on him to co-produce the album, but she recognized a fellow traveler in his own globetrotting sonic collage. "Lionel went above and beyond as a co-producer. He and I share the same vision for how we approach music, so I think there was an automatic trust, respect, and appreciation there. He has a really beautiful spirit and we formed a special relationship; he's been incredibly generous and supportive of my music."
Þ "I see myself as a cultural interlocutor. A singer can play an almost mystical role, connecting these different elements on stage with an audience through the human voice, through words. With the Visions project, it's amazing to see the Joni Mitchell fan who has never before seen a kora standing next to the hardcore jazz fan who would not expect to hear tablas on a Wayne Shorter tune. I hope that people find something familiar in the music that draws them in, but then discover something new that might change, even for a second, how they see the world."
ABOUT:
Þ Hailed by Downbeat Magazine as the "Best Graduate Jazz Vocalist" (2012) and winner of the ASCAP Herb Alpert Young Jazz Composers Award (2013), Kavita Shah is gaining a reputation as a visionary young singer, composer, and arranger. A native New Yorker of Indian origin fluent in Spanish, Portuguese, and French, Ms. Shah incorporates elements of Indian, Brazilian, and Malian music into her jazz-based repertoire. Her debut CD VISIONS–produced by Benin-born jazz guitarist Lionel Loueke — combines the sounds of the traditional Indian tablas and West African kora with those of a jazz quintet.
Þ "Visions," which includes special guests Loueke (guitar, vocals), Steve Wilson (saxophone, flute), and Rogerio Boccato (percussion), was released to critical acclaim in the US & Canada on May 27, 2014 on Greg Osby's Inner Circle Music label. (It will be released September 15, 2014 in Europe & Japan on the French label Naïve).
Ms. Shah grew up in Manhattan, studying classical piano from age 5 and performing regularly at Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center from age 10 as a member of the award-winning Young People's Chorus of NYC. She was a semifinalist in the 2011 Voicingers International Jazz Competition held in Zory, Poland, and she has since performed as a leader in France, Belgium, and Germany. She plays frequently in the New York metro area at such venues as National Jazz Museum in Harlem, Rubin Museum, Cornelia Street Café, Bar Next Door, 55 Bar, Shapeshifter Lab, Minton's Playhouse, NuBlu, Nuyorican Poets Café, University Club, Harvard Club, New Jersey Performing Arts Center, and in the greater Northeast at The Kennedy Center (DC) and Vermont Jazz Center. Ms. Shah has had the pleasure of collaborating with such artists as Sheila Jordan, Peter Eldridge, Steve Wilson, Lionel Loueke, Linda Oh, Gilad Hekselman, Rogerio Boccato, Pierre de Bethmann, Yacouba Sissoko, Stephen Cellucci, and Samir Chatterjee, among others.
Þ In addition to the "Visions" project, Ms. Shah leads the Brazil Trio, a jazz quintet, and the 3rd World Orquestra, a 13-piece ensemble with tabla, kora, rhythm section, and strings. She regularly works with contemporary composers and has premiered over 12 works in ensembles ranging from chamber groups to big band to jazz philharmonic. She is a member of the Steve Newcomb Orchestra ("Caterpillar Chronicles," Listen/Hear Collective 2012), and is the lead voice for tabla virtuoso Samir Chatterjee's project "Rabi Thakur."
Þ Ms. Shah received her Master's in Jazz Voice from Manhattan School of Music, where she studied with Theo Bleckmann, Peter Eldridge, Steve Wilson, and Jim McNeely. She holds a B.A. from Harvard College in Latin American Studies, where she was the recipient of the Cultural Agents Thesis Prize and the Kenneth D. Maxwell Prize in Brazilian Studies for her ethnomusicology research on contemporary Afro-Brazilian music and politics.
Label: http://en.naive.fr/
Website: http://www.kavitashahmusic.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/cantakavita
YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhBfdg93cijvmQweDrvw95RnT1nqMw8Nj
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/KavitaShahMusic
Press: Don Lucoff: 610-667-0501,
CD Baby: http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/kavitashah
DL Media Music: http://dlmediamusic.com/artist/kavita-shah/
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