Interview by Joe Montague
The
greatest compliment that one can receive concerning their music, is usually
derived from their peers, and so in preparing for my conversation with jazz
singer, Angela Carole Brown, I contacted my friend drummer Craig Pilo, who among
his many musical ventures, performs and records as part of Brown’s The Slow Club
Quartet and I also contacted guitar virtuoso Ken Rosser who plays alongside
Brown in The Global Folk.
“The thing that I find both strikingly unique and
inspiring about Angela is her generosity. Rather than view the band as something
she sings on top of, she sings inside the band, finding a way to mesh with the
other instruments as an equal. She yields space, focus and direction to other
members of the band, to make the whole thing sound as good as it can. She is the
ultimate team player, and as a result, the respect that she commands among
musicians at every artistic and professional level is no accident. Angela is the
kind of musician whose vision shapes the whole music, not just her own
performance. Being able to play or sing is one thing, but ultimately it is about
what you have to say. Angela always has something to say,” says Ken Rosser.
Whether one is listening to
Mick Jagger’s, “Gimme Shelter,” which comprised the opening track of Angela
Carole Brown’s jazz CD,
Expressionism
or a song from
Resting On The Rock,
an album to which she refers as Post-Modernist Folk, there is always a cohesive
sound to the music, and Brown is so effective in the way that she uses her
voice, that it truly becomes another instrument in the bands, rather that the
instrumentalists serving merely as her accompaniment.
To that end, Craig Pilo, who has
known Brown since the mid nineties, comments, “I’ve never heard singing, soul,
diction, tone, and commitment like hers, from any other singer. Great singers
are a dime a dozen, especially here in
Despite the fact that Brown
is an accomplished songwriter, something that Pilo also noted when he was
contacted, only one of her compositions, “Sleepwalk,” appears on
Expressionism.
The other songs include Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes, ”Tom Waits’,
“A Soldier’s Things,” ”Joni Mitchell’s,“ Both
Sides Now, and Lennon and McCartney’s, “In My Life.”
Brown explains how rocker Mick Jagger’s tune, “Gimme
Shelter,” came to be included on her jazz album. “All four of us in the quartet
threw songs onto the table and said, ‘What do you think of this?’ That has been
encouraged. In this particular case, “Gimme Shelter,” was brought forth by the
bass player Don Kasper. He is the newest member of the band, and he has caught
on to what we want to do, which is cover (tunes), because I am not writing
anymore in the jazz vein. We didn’t want to do a standards CD, but instead cull
from other genres and put these songs into jazz environments.
“Because I am a vocalist, and
not an instrumentalist, the most important part for me is the lyrics. Are they
saying something that resonates with a personal experience of my own? I have to
admit, that secondarily, (I ask) what is it like musically and harmonically?
Those things, of course, are important to me,
and the more interesting that they are the better. Although I was not the one to
bring, “Gimme Shelter,” to the table, I always felt that it was radical in its
soul, in terms of what it is saying about anti-war and so forth. It has a little
bit of the activist in its soul, and I resonate with that.”
It was Brown who selected
Joni Mitchell’s, “Both Sides Now,” as one of the tracks for
Expressionism,
and both the song and Mitchell are close to her own heart. “This is one of my
favorite all time songs, and she was one of the greatest inspirations (in my
life) for me to start singing in the first place. Joni Mitchell and Ella
Fitzgerald are the two people that when I was growing up and listening to them,
they made me want to sing. This particular song is one of my favorites in
lyrical terms. I think that the song has even greater resonance, with Mitchell
singing it as an older woman, because really it is a song about looking back
over your life, and assessing it. She recorded it again, maybe four years ago,
with an orchestral arrangement.”
Brown believes that what has enabled her bands to cover
well-known songs and still have them well received is the approach that she and
her band members take in making these tunes their own. “We have made them very
different than the originals. I think that it begs comparisons when you are just
making what has already been done. When you do something that is really
different, there is less of a tendency for people to compare them to the
originals. I am very proud of the fact that we have managed to do that. We
haven’t done the songs in the way that we know them,” she says.
Brown’s phrasing is impeccable
as she sings the reflective John Lennon and Paul McCartney classic, “In My
Life,” and pianist Ed Czach wrote a beautiful new arrangement, so that the music
would fit into a jazz setting. The patrons of Jax Bar & Grill, a cozy jazz club
in
“We just showed up at the gig, and Ed said, ‘Here’s my
arrangement.’ We all heard it for the first time, while we were playing it. It
jus blew me away, because he has a harmonic sensibility like nobody else. He
created a harmonic environment that was so unlike the original recording, but it
still captured the soul of the tune. It blew me away. I heard it for the first
time, while I was singing it,” recalls Brown.
Angela Carole Brown’s alter
ego emerges when she becomes the singer for The Global Folk, a band which
released
Resting On The Rock,
in 2004, and surfaced again in 2008, when she recorded a more stripped down,
organic CD
Music For The Weeping Woman,
with The Global Folk’s guitarist, Ken Rosser.
“I decided that I wanted to do something that was a
little more intimate. Ken Rosser is an amazing guitar player. I think that we
are musical soulmates, because we think alike in terms of how we approach music.
I was trying to experiment, and not do what has already been done. I don’t know
if I always accomplish that, but that is what I am always trying for. Ken is
amazing, as he plays stringed instruments from all different cultures,” she says
while rhyming off numerous instruments and their countries of origin.
Brown helps me to understand
why it is that she refers to this side of her musical ledger as Post-Modern Folk
Experimentation. “When most people think of folk music, they automatically
assume that it is acoustic. I know that was a very significant aspect of folk
music in a certain era, but we do very little acoustic music with this project.
We play around with the limitations of the guitar and what we can do with it, as
well as, what we can make it do.
We (determine) how we can exploit that in
terms of writing music. I call it Post-Modern, because we are definitely taking
the notion of folk music, and stylistically it still harkens to (that genre).
The music still (possesses) socially conscious ideas that harkens back to folk
music. From a purely sonic and instrumental perspective, we are doing a lot of
electronic and experimental things with the groove, which is why I call it
Post-Modern Folk Experimentation.”
In addition to being an
accomplished singer and songwriter in two diverse genres, Angela Carole Brown is
also a gifted painter, graphics design artist and novelist. Her fiction novel
Trading
Fours, which was published in 2005 and has
been well received.
Brown talks about
Trading Fours,
a book which chronicles the lives of four musicians, “I have actually written a
few novels and this one is not even the first.
I decided to publish
Trading Fours
first, because I felt I had a built in audience, as most of the people that I
know are musicians.
In the interim, Angela Carole
Brown is weaving quite a story of her own and rather than waiting for someone to
write a book about it and read it in the past tense, you just might want to get
your ticket punched by purchasing a copy of
Expressionism
or
Music For The Weeping Woman, and enjoying
her music in the here and now.