Lena Seikaly - Lovely Changes

Bitrate: MP3@320K/s
Time: 42:01
Size: 96.2 MB
Styles: Jazz vocals
Year: 2011
Art: Front

[4:06] 1. Amateur
[4:33] 2. Memento
[3:37] 3. Triste
[3:41] 4. What Was I Supposed To Do
[4:03] 5. The Way You Look Tonight
[4:47] 6. Here Again
[4:07] 7. God Only Knows
[4:09] 8. Can't Get Out Of This Mood
[4:11] 9. Everytime We Say Goodbye
[4:42] 10. Waltz #1

Given Lena Seikaly’s firm grounding in harmony and composition, it’s no surprise that a musician sharing the bandstand with her once remarked on a harmonic progression she’d written: “Man, those are some lovely changes!” The phrase struck a chord and emerged as the title of her second recording.

On Seikaly’s new album, her second, there are Lovely Changes in more ways than one. The album presents a constantly shifting harmonic and rhythmic landscape in which familiar jazz classics by Cole Porter, Frank Loesser and Jerome Kern co-exist alongside Seikaly originals and unexpected arrangements of more contemporary songs by Elliot Smith, Brian Wilson and Amie Mann; a touch of 1967 Antonio Carlos Jobim bridges the gap. Seikaly’s cool, classic jazz voice breathes a cohesive beauty into the recording, the release of which she celebrates with a show this Sunday at Blues Alley. Her vocals are complemented by the savvy arrangements and sensitive musicianship that she and her band mates put forward; the group is comprised of Dan Roberts on piano, Tom Baldwin on bass and Dominic Smith on
drums. ~Ken Avis

Lovely Changes

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Lena Seikaly - Written In The Stars

Bitrate: MP3@320K/s
Time: 52:41
Size: 120.6 MB
Styles: Jazz vocals
Year: 2009
Art: Front

[5:27] 1. East Of The Sun
[5:20] 2. Gravitation
[5:56] 3. When I Fall In Love
[4:41] 4. A String Of Questions
[6:10] 5. The Very Thought Of You
[4:09] 6. You Go To My Head
[4:57] 7. Snapped
[5:40] 8. Duke Ellington Sound Of Love
[4:57] 9. It Only Takes A Moment
[5:20] 10. Written In The Stars

LENA SEIKALY is a fresh voice on the national jazz scene from Washington, D.C. Named “one of Washington’s preeminent jazz singers" and “brightest voices in jazz" (The Washington Post), as well as a “major league young talent in jazz" by Duke Ellington’s biographer, Dr. John Hasse, Lena is already making her mark as both a revivalist of traditional jazz vocals, as well as an innovator in contemporary vocal jazz styles. She began her training at age four with piano, continued with classical voice in her teens, and went on to complete a B.M. in classical vocal performance at the University of Maryland School of Music. It was in college where Lena discovered a strong passion for jazz, and embarked on a fervent education of jazz history, styles, theory and composition before pursuing a jazz career in the Washington, D.C. area. Most recently, she was named one of eleven semi-finalists for the 2015 Thelonious Monk Institute International Jazz Vocals Competition. She was a Strathmore Artist-In-Residence in 2009-2010, a participant in the prestigious Betty Carter Jazz Ahead residency in Washington, D.C. (2009) where she worked closely with Dr. Billy Taylor, Carmen Lundy, George Cables, Curtis Fuller, Winard Harper and others, and a participant at the Jazz Aspen Snowmass program in Aspen, CO (2005), directed by Christian McBride.

As the leader of her own trio, quartet and quintet, Lena has headlined at such renowned D.C. venues as Blues Alley, the Kennedy Center’s Millennium Stage, the Atlas Theater, Strathmore Mansion, and at festivals across the U.S. (including the Elkhart Jazz Festival and Mel Bay Jazz Festival) and in Holland, Switzerland, and France. Lena has self-produced three albums – Written In The Stars (2009), Lovely Changes (2011) and Looking Back (2013) – all three received critical acclaim from music critics in leading D.C. online and print publications, and the latter two of which were released to sold-out shows at Blues Alley. Lovely Changes earned her the titles of D.C.’s “Best Vocalist" and “Best Composer" for 2011 by the Washington City Paper, while Looking Back — a tribute to Ethel Waters, Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald, and featuring “lost songs" from the 1920s and ‘30s — was dubbed “the work of a supremely confident master of her instrument" by the same publication.

Lena is also very active in the D.C. area as a professional classical mezzo-soprano, a recording artist in varying genres, and arranger, and in 2012 had the unique privilege of being commissioned to arrange a suite of Antonio Carlos Jobim’s music for a 16-piece version of the New Orchestra of Washington, which premiered later that same year. An avid educator, Lena was the jazz vocal instructor at the Duke Ellington School of the Arts during 2008-09, and has lead seasonal workshops at the Strathmore Music Center for aspiring jazz vocalists since 2010. As a Palestinian American, Lena has also been involved in many Arabic fusion projects both in the U.S. and abroad — in summer of 2015, she toured in Palestine (West Bank) and Israel as the featured vocalist with Al-Manara, a European-Palestinian ensemble performing original music based on the life of its Palestinian composer and founder, Ramzi Aburedwan.

Written In The Stars

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Lena Seikaly - Looking Back

Size: 123,2 MB
Time: 52:47
File: MP3 @ 320K/s
Released: 2013
Styles: Jazz Vocals
Art: Front

01. I'm Nobody's Baby (4:02)
02. Fascinating Rhythm (4:28)
03. Foolin' Myself (4:45)
04. Please Don't Talk About Me When I'm Gone (3:16)
05. Baby, What Else Can I Do? (5:07)
06. I'm Coming, Virginia (4:13)
07. I Cover The Waterfront (5:59)
08. Love You Madly (5:47)
09. Guilty (5:41)
10. Supper Time (5:02)
11. After You've Gone (4:19)

Renowned performer Harry Connick, Jr. recently admonished young singers to think about what the lyrics mean, and not to overdo. Lena Seikaly needs no such advice. She is blessed with a beautiful natural instrument; excellent vocal training at the University of Maryland; taste and sensitivity; superb control of pitch and vibrato; and a gift for inventing delightfully improvised lines that remind one of Ella Fitzgerald’s brilliant scat singing at its best.

As a valentine to a golden age of American songwriting and singing, Lena has chosen nearly a dozen of her favorite vintage songs, with an emphasis on material recorded by Ethel Waters, Billie Holiday, or Ella Fitzgerald, but not often performed today. Encompassing a range of tempos and emotions, the songs were composed between 1918 and 1939, plus one outlier from 1950. To accompany her, she assembled a quartet of top musicians, including pianist Chris Grasso, himself an improviser of singable melody lines.

To single out several gems: Irving Berlin wrote Suppertime for Ethel Waters to sing in the 1933 revue As Thousands Cheer. Stretching across gender and color lines, Berlin’s lyrics give voice to an African American wife and mother who has just lost her husband to a lynching. Accompanied only by Chris Grasso’s pensive piano, Lena sings the melody virtually straight, delivering the understated ¬lyric with controlled yet palpable emotion and poignancy, holding the last note a full ten aching seconds. Duke Ellington’s Love You Madly surprises as a delightful duet with bassist Zack Pride. Another highlight, After You’ve Gone, closes the album with infectious scat singing and a big exclamation point, a fitting finale for this bouquet to a bygone era.

-- John Edward Hasse
John Edward Hasse is Curator of American Music at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, and founder of Jazz Appreciation Month. His books include Beyond Category: The Life and Genius of Duke Ellington and Discover Jazz.

Looking Back

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