Bill Gati - Piano Expressions

Styles: Piano Jazz
Year: 2015
File: MP3@320K/s
Time: 50:36
Size: 117,8 MB
Art: Front

(4:12) 1. All of Me
(4:51) 2. April in New York
(2:23) 3. Bye Bye Blues
(4:17) 4. Building Blocks
(2:07) 5. Good Times
(4:08) 6. Hit It
(1:41) 7. Joy
(4:11) 8. Love Song
(4:29) 9. Love
(3:32) 10. May in New York
(9:13) 11. Peace in the Valley
(5:25) 12. Something Else

William Gati Bom April 1O, 1959, in Rio Di Janeiro, Brazil Initially trained as a classical pianist (he studied at Juilliard from the age of 8), William Gati has been drawn to Jazz while studying with the great John Lewis (Modern Jazz Quartet). After graduating from City College (1981), he has played in various church venues and has been influenced by gospel music. He has also been involved in directing and performing in musicals and has been influences by the Broadway Show style. His greatest strength, however, is in improvising and performing jazz standards and original compositions.

He has been influenced by Sir Roland Hanna (a good friend and Professor at Queens College), John Lewis (another friend), Herbie Hancock, Dr. Billy Taylor and Duke Ellington. He has performed with various local Jazz artist such as John Dooley (bass),Hank Holzer (drums), Premik Tubbs (wind), and John Smith (drums). He has played in Lincoln Center, Queens College, Forest Park Band Shell, local halls and various other venues.

He has three CD's independently produced called "Piece of Pie," "Box 0' Chocolates," and "Intricate". All three recordings are collections of original jazz compositions written, performed and recorded by Mr. Gati. He explores various musical concepts in a truly jazz style.

William Gati is also a talented saxophonist, vocalist, writer, architect (he is registered) and painter. He believes that we must all let the music out from within us. His work has been featured in many books and articles for example "Who's Who in the East," "Who's Who in the World," "Newsday," "Creations in Space," and "Personality Types".

His jazz style is soulful, smooth and technical all in various proportions. He loves to play straight-ahead jazz but particularly enjoys playing original compositions. His performances are lively and interesting because they are spontaneous and inspired by the moment. He will play the piano, play the saxophone and sing (but not all at the same time) as well as tell stories and inspiring anecdotes. He can put on a very entertaining, creative and memorable performance
.https://www.allaboutjazz.com/musicians/bill-gati/

Piano Expressions

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Adi Braun - Live At The Metropolitan Room

Bitrate: 320K/s
Time: 64:22
Size: 147.4 MB
Styles: Jazz vocals
Year: 2008
Art: Front

[5:40] 1. That Old Black Magic
[4:45] 2. Witchcraft
[5:59] 3. That Old Devil Moon
[7:23] 4. That Ole Devil Called Love
[3:17] 5. Love Me Or Love Me
[4:36] 6. Easy To Breathe
[4:40] 7. You Do Something To Me
[6:09] 8. Besame Mucho
[4:54] 9. Honeysuckle Rose
[5:43] 10. Miss Celie's Blues
[3:36] 11. Night And Day
[3:10] 12. Some Other Time
[4:24] 13. Ocean Eyes

"You really should record a live album" is what I have heard now for a few years from friends and colleagues. "But how and when and what if it's not perfect?" has been my question. "Perfect!" has been their answer.

New York has become a second home for me over the past few years and I am filled with excitement every time I sing in that crazy and wonderful city. New Yorkers are unparalleled in their support and enthusiasm for good music and I have been very fortunate to have sung at several great venues there, including the fabulous Metropolitan Room, which is where this CD was recorded.

I loved making my two previous albums, The Rules of the Game and Delishious, and learned much about the process of putting together a studio recording. But since the very essence of jazz is one of freedom, spontaneity and "being in the moment", it made sense to me, at this point in my career, to embark on my first live recording. Though we didn't plan to turn the evening of October 26th into a live recording, which would have meant using a multi-track recording technique (instead of the one-track recording technique that was used, which doesn't allow for any "fixes" later on), all the stars shone in our favour that night.

From the piano that had just been tuned the day before, to the great skills of recording engineer Jean-Pierre Perreaux, to all the special people in the audience, and to the fact that all the musicians - myself, pianist Tedd Firth and bassist Steve Watson - were very much in synch and having tremendous fun that night everything seemed like a blessing for this project. One song that was not a part of this show was my own composition, "Ocean Eyes"; by popular demand, I have included it here as a bonus studio recording.

I had called my show "Heart to Heart" and my intention was to musically engage in an open and heart-felt dialogue between singer, song and audience. So sit back and relax as you are about to listen to as "naked" and truthful a delivery of music as I could have hoped for - joyful and honest. ~Adi Braun.

Live At The Metropolitan Room

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Chihiro Yamanaka - Lach Doch Mal

Styles: Piano Jazz 
Year: 2006
File: MP3@320K/s
Time: 53:18
Size: 124,3 MB
Art: Front

(4:01)  1. Quand Biron Voulut Danser
(3:58)  2. Sabot
(5:41)  3. Serenade To A Cuckoo
(3:54)  4. RTG
(4:25)  5. The Dolphin
(2:51)  6. Night Loop
(4:14)  7. One Step Up
(0:45)  8. Lach Doch Mal
(5:35)  9. Liebesleid
(4:54) 10. Mode To John
(7:06) 11. What A Diff'rence A Day Made
(5:49) 12. That's All

Chihiro Yamanaka is an internationally renowned, hard-swinging jazz pianist, composer, and bandleader, whose fluid, athletic technique has drawn rave reviews and very favorable comparisons to legends such as Oscar Peterson and Art Tatum. She is based in New York. Yamanaka was born in Kiryu, in Japan's Gunma Prefecture, in 1976. At age four she began formal piano studies. While she began with classical music and still practices it, she shifted her focus to jazz studies in high school. After graduation she attended the Berklee College of Music in Boston as part of the Betty Carter Jazz Ahead residency program. She played with a wide range of musicians in Boston and in New York before heading back home to Japan after she graduated from Berklee in 2000 with honors and took first place in Down Beat's Outstanding Performance Award competition.Temporarily returning to Japan, she began her recording career there in 2001 with Living Without Friday, the first of four annually released titles issued by the Japanese label Atelier Sawano. Nonetheless, Yamanaka's long-player gained notice immediately from critics and radio stations. Her 2002 follow-up, When October Goes, hit the top rungs of the Japanese jazz charts, and word began to spread among fans and critics across the Pacific back to America. Yamanaka had reached the level where she could tour not only in her home country but also Europe and select U.S. dates. During this time she was also a member of DIVA, the all-female big band led by drummer Sherrie Maricle. Yamanaka also performed with the DIVA spin-off quintet Five Play, who backed Marlene VerPlanck on her 2003 album It's How You Play the Game, all while continuing to tour and release her own recordings.

In 2005 she signed a worldwide deal with Universal's Classics and Jazz division and issued her North American debut with the trio effort Outside by the Swing, recorded in New York City with drummer Jeff "Tain" Watts and bassist Robert Hurst. Yamanaka immigrated to the States and issued the audio-video package Lach Doch Mal in 2006 with Larry Grenadier and Jeff Ballard. While neither record made the jazz charts in the States, they reached the Top Five in Japan and upped the pianist's reputation to the degree that she became a global nomad, touring in the U.S., Europe, and Japan. Arriving in 2007, Abyss was her first recording to feature drummer Kendrick Scott and bassist Vicente Archer, who became her working trio. She broke the trio mold with 2009's Runnin' Wild, where her piano fronted a sextet. On 2010's Forever Begins, bassist Ben Williams replaced Archer in her trio. The following year saw the release of Reminiscence, which placed a live performance at the Iridium in New York with a studio album that featured Yamanaka in three different trio settings. In 2012 Yamanaka released the first of two tribute albums, Because, a loving nod to the Beatles on which she backed by a quartet played not only piano but synthesizer, organ, guitar, ukulele, and harmonica. 

Because was followed by the standards releases After Hours and After Hours 2. In 2013, she offered her tribute to classical music with Molto Cantabile. In 2014, Yamanaka moved from Verve to the Universal-owned Blue Note label just in time for its 75th anniversary. Her debut, Somethin' Blue, was a sextet offering, and in addition to originals offered striking renditions of Bud Powell's "Un Poco Loco" and Herbie Hancock's "I Have a Dream." It reached into the Top Five on the jazz charts. She followed it the same year with Syncopation Hazard, her tribute to Scott Joplin. Yamanaka returned to the trio format for 2016's Blue Note-issued Guilty, which placed her original compositions alongside select pieces by Hoagy Carmichael. Near the end of 2017, Yamanaka produced and arranged Monk Studies. She played acoustic and electric piano, synth, and Hammond B-3 organ in an almost exclusively Monk program backed by drummer Deantoni Parks and bassist Mark Kelly. ~ Thom Jurek https://www.allmusic.com/artist/chihiro-yamanaka-mn0000283696/biography

Personnel: Chihiro Yamanaka(piano).

Lach Doch Mal

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Céline Rudolph - Soniqs

Styles: Vocal
Year: 2023
File: MP3@320K/s
Time: 48:21
Size: 111,9 MB
Art: Front

(3:30) 1. Good News
(4:49) 2. Seven Butterflies
(6:30) 3. Sundance
(2:01) 4. Birds In The Sky
(5:43) 5. Inner Room I
(5:35) 6. The Sun In Me
(5:51) 7. Footprints
(4:26) 8. 69 Année Érotique
(7:16) 9. Inner Room Ii
(2:36) 10. The Muse

Vocalist and composer Céline Rudolph glides between Berlin, São Paulo, Paris and New York, between tongues and genres, always landing in the very heart of music. „Music is like breathing, it was there ever since I could remember“ Céline Rudolph says and recollects how her father always played a break when jamming on the guitar, so that there was a space for his children to create improvised lines or percussive fills. Born in Berlin and raised with her parents’ rich record collection, the daughter of a Frenchwoman from Bordeaux and a cosmopolitan musical enthusiast from Berlin, started singing along with an LP from João Gilberto performing the Brazilian classic “Rosa Morena” to an LP at the age of five. Her mother was singing French chansons to her at home, while Céline learned to play Nat Adderley’s “WorkSong” on her recorder.

She picked up the piano and started composing as an autodidact, then started writing French songs on the guitar, which became her main tool of expression. In short: multi-path orientation was on the cards from the very beginning. After university studies of rhetorics and philosophy, she realized that music exerted a much stronger pull, so she switched to a degree in vocal jazz and composition at Hochschule der Künste Berlin with mentors David Friedman, Jerry Granelli, Kirk Nurock and Catherine Gayer. Soon, she plunged into African music and studied with the percussionist Famoudou Konaté in West Africa. Her love of Brazilian music led her to São Paulo where she met Rodolfo Stroeter who produced three of her albums and four tours across Europe and Brazil so far: The albums are BRAZAVENTURE, METAMORFLORES (enja records) and SALVADOR (Verve,Universal).

Since 2015 she is collaborating with New York based Beninese guitarist Lionel Loueke, having recorded the duo album OBSESSION and then playing together at 12th Jarasum Int. Jazz Festival in South Korea. “This is a very unique project because there are no boundaries. I knew from the start that we are kind of from the same tribe,” says Lionel Loueke. Since then, the duo toured Europe, Asia and Africa (including a tour to West Africa on behalf of the Goethe Institute). The album OBSESSION reached the annual list of the German Critics Award „Preis der Deutschen Schallplattenkritik“, and won Céline Rudolph the prestigious German Jazz Award ECHO JAZZ 2018 for best jazz vocalist. Now, praised as „a jewel of European jazz vocals“ by the French radio station, TSF, having recorded numerous albums with many wonderful musicians including Gary Peacock, Bob Moses, Naná Vasconcelos, Diego Figueiredo and Marcos Suzano, and esteemed by colleagues like Bobby McFerrin, Lee Konitz or Jay Clayton, the adventurous pearl fisher sailed from Berlin to Brooklyn for her new album PEARLS (out 21st of June 2019).

Co-producer Jamire Williams: „I’ve never heard anything like Céline’s music, she writes in such a unique way, and her vocal sound is second to none. Her vibes and flow in connection with what our band has created make this production so special.“ Besides performing with Lionel Loueke and PEARLS, Céline Rudolph started a solo programme combining loops, effects, percussion and guitar.
https://www.allaboutjazz.com/musicians/celine-rudolph

Soniqs

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Fay Victor - Blackity Black Black Is Beautiful

Styles: Vocal
Year: 2023
File: MP3@320K/s
Time: 40:09
Size: 92,9 MB
Art: Front

(2:38) 1. Black Woman's Music
(2:48) 2. Breezy Point Ain't Breezy
(3:53) 3. Vocal Layer of Pandemic Doom (Dedicated to All the Loved Ones We've Lost)
(5:22) 4. Scared To Be Happy
(3:46) 5. Governorship/Senate (For Stacey Abrams)
(5:10) 6. How Can You Do It?
(5:55) 7. I Will Be Erased
(6:21) 8. Signs (A Question For Sages Everywhere)
(4:14) 9. Trust The Universe

“Blackity Black Black Is Beautiful is the very first solo record by Fay Victor, whose 30-year-long music career has covered everything from House, New Music, Jazz (Blues) and Free Improvisation. Her deep history with dance music, her genreless output, and her lived experience as a Black woman in the world shaped the brand new process she used to create this prismatic album which touches on all the decades of her life like diary snapshots. It’s a mesmerizing collection of composed work that could only be made by an extraordinary improviser.

From hearing the raw, almost gospel vocal style over a heavy beat of Donna Summer and Sylvester, to obsessing over shows like Soul Train, Solid Gold, and Dance Fever on TV, to experiencing the sweat and groove, the freedom of bodies moving at NYC clubs like Danceteria, The Loft, and the Paradise Garage – her life changed forever. As she was developing as a jazz singer in Amsterdam in the 90s, she danced to trance music in clubs like Mazzo and The Soul Kitchen. She landed on the Billboard charts with a club hit “You Make Me Happy” in ’91. Stoned on the sacred dance floor, Fay found ecstasy in the moving body, the groove, the beat.

As she entered deeper into the world of jazz, she was attracted to the rhythmic qualities of Thelonious Monk, Eddie Harris, Eric Dolphy, Art Ensemble of Chicago, Betty Carter, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Nicole Mitchell, Milford Graves, Julius Hemphill, Charles Mingus, Herbie Nichols. Their confrontational rhythm sends her soul leaping, connecting her back to her clubheadheart.

With Mavin Gaye’s “Got To Give It Up” as a template, Fay started thinking about how her solo album might unfold. She sang, played keyboards, added textures and further dimensions with no other humans, without electronics. That was her process. Thoroughly creative, composed with music and words straight from her spirit.”
https://www.fayvictor.com/2023/08/25/new-fv-album-blackity-black-black-is-beautiful-released-today/

Blackity Black Black Is Beautiful

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