Styles: Jazz, Vocal
Year: 2006
File: MP3@256K/s
Time: 63:19
Size: 116,7 MB
Art: Front
(3:09) 1. The Cuckoo Song
(5:03) 2. Sigh No More
(4:00) 3. For Love Of You
(8:25) 4. Rain Every Day
(4:36) 5. Desi's Blues
(4:44) 6. Mistress Mine
(3:44) 7. The Fabulous Minstrel
(3:06) 8. Take Those Lips Away
(3:11) 9. The Lover And His Lass
(5:15) 10. The Beauty Of Your Eyes
(3:38) 11. Be Merry
(2:58) 12. She Loves Another
(4:00) 13. Goodbye To The Devil
(3:41) 14. Till The World Goes Round
(3:41) 15. Under The Blossom
Diane Nalini was born in Montreal, Quebec, and began singing jazz at the age of three. A gifted and sophisticated singer; she has performed in the United Kingdom, Malta, South Africa, and Canada, and has received airplay in Denmark and Brazil. In addition to her flourishing jazz career, Nalini also studied Chinese calligraphy and watercolour for ten years with Virginia Chang. In that time she exhibited and sold paintings with Chang, and was also a member of the Ting Sung group. Nalini received an honours physics degree from McGill University, and earned a doctoratal degree in Physics from Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar. She now works as a physics professor at the University of Guelph. Nalini released her first album, After Dusk, in 2001, and Tales … My Mama Told Me in 2002. Songs of Sweet Fire (2006) is her third full length album, and features original music set to the sonnets and songs of William Shakespeare.
The evolution of the album dates back to 2000, when Nalini was a student in the UK. Having previously experimented setting music to texts by Lord Alfred Tennyson and García Lorca, she turned to Shakespeare for an ensemble show in Oxford. It was here that she first set original music to Shakespearean texts, completing “Mistress Mine” and “Rain Every Day,” two songs from Twelfth Night. Nalini comments that after her initial experience, “Shakespeare was in my blood, and every year after that, I would tackle a few more songs from the plays” (Setting Shakespeare to Music). Her fifteen-song collection covers a wide array of music, from original jazz to funk and blues. The sonnets and poems were each carefully selected, as she comments, “It was very important to me to let the phrasing of the words dictate the style of music I wrote for each song. I decided to set only those songs which were in more modern sounding English, to highlight the timelessness of Shakespeare’s words” (University of Guelph News Release).
Nalini’s adaptation puts “a uniquely modern spin” on the words of Shakespeare, which is rarely done musically, and is rarer still within the jazz and blues genre (Biography). Her renditions have been hailed by critics as “overwhelming,” “eloquent,” and “captivating” (Diane Nalini Reviews). While Shakespeare’s plays and words have been an inspiration to musicians for centuries, spurring musicals, operas, and even rock music, Nalini states that her music has a fun, and original sound as it “is groove-based…. and rhythm-based” (Cosmic Coincidence and Shakespeare). It is this fresh sound that has great potential to deliver the unchanged words of Shakespeare, to an audience largely outside theatrical culture. Nalini also put another of her talent to work, as a means of adapting Shakespeare.
The lyrics in the linear notes are accompanied by fifteen original watercolours she created for the album. Her designs, while not directly relatable to Shakespeare, without the corresponding prose, have a notable distinction as they are one example of how the works of Shakespeare have transposed into contemporary Canadian society, inspiring unlikely and beautiful contributions to the artistic community. In a recent proposal, Nalini outlines her visualization process for each piece, and how the language, and themes of Shakespeare were the underlying force in colour, design, and framing. In the piece accompanying Desi’s Blues, for instance, Nalini explains, “a hand kept coming to mind. To me, the hand belongs to Othello or Iago, Desdemona’s oppressors. It overpowers her source of solace, the willow tree” (Proposal 5). Nalini's Songs of Sweet Fire debuted at the University of Guelph on May 25th, 2006 and served as a kick-off event to the Shakespeare-Made in Canada Festival, which ran from January to May 2007. ~ Danielle Van Wagner http://www.canadianshakespeares.ca/multimedia/audio/a_nalini.cfm
