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Sylvia Hutton
The opening song for the album “Avalon,” transports the listener to
Camelot and the days of King Arthur. Sylvia and Verlon Thompson wrote
“Avalon,” a beautifully orchestrated song with lush vocals by Sylvia.
For any child, any teenager, any adult whoever wished you could close
your eyes and open them to find yourself in a magical place, Sylvia
invites you to take her hand to travel to a place where the walls are
made of freedom and every tear becomes a shining star.
Normally, we would not credit so many musicians, but they earned their due on “Avalon,” guitars, both electric and acoustic by John Mock, as well as mandolin and percussion. Matt McGee played bass, Skip Cleavinger played the Uilleann pipes, oboe by Somerlie Pasquale, Emily Bowland on clarinet, trumpet (Jeff Bailey), French horn (Jennifer Kummer), violins by Conni Ellisor and Mary Kathryn Van Osdale, viola (Betsy Lamb) and cellist Nicholas Gold.
About the musicians, |
The Claudettes Going Out!
The album was recorded in Chicago over what Johnny Iguana describes as,
“sprawling events.”
Continuing he says, “Half of the record was recorded in piecemeal during
the lockdown era. I had my engineer (Grammy Award nominated) Anthony
Gravino come over and record my piano to a click track and got good
takes that we liked. Then we had Berit do the vocals. We had Mike and
Zac practice in my basement. They were songs that we had mostly played
live, so it wasn’t like they were being introduced to new material.
Fortunately for me when COVID arrived I had been on a big writing streak
and the majority were songs that we had started playing live. It was (a
matter of) tightening up and making some choices for the studio. Then we
went into the studio and they recorded it and we did overdubs.
Generally, it involved only a couple of people in the studio at a time
and with masks. That was in 2020 and into 2021. Then in 2021 we felt we
could get into a space together and record. That led me to believe that
the songs from both recording periods wouldn’t play well together on
something you might call an album, because the recordings used
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Beatrix Löw-Beer
Artists such as
Beatrix Löw-Beer
are the reason why people are discovering the saxophone for the first
time. When you watch her concert performances or videos to promotional
videos everything from her movement to her attitude and her costumes
exhibits an exuberance for performing music. One is never left with the
impression that you are watching someone playing an instrument, because
her saxophone becomes an extension of her persona.
Take us back to where this all began.
I grew up in Augsburg, which is one hour from Munich, which is the
capital of Bavaria. It is in the south of Germany, very close to
Austria. Augsburg is the third largest city in Bavaria and I think it
has 300,000 residents. There are two rivers in my city, the Lech and
Wertach, (which flow into
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Evie Sands
“I trust in the music and then I let it go. I think it is probably a
combination of things. It is my ongoing and will be forever, my insane
passion for music, about making it, listening to it and breaking it
down. I enjoy it, but I like to figure out what is that stuff sonically,
what is going on and it is the enjoyment part of it. It is just ongoing.
It is just like I was born, and I started listening. I just get excited.
Then there is the striving to continually get better and all the skills
that are involved, whether it is continuing to be a better singer, a
better songwriter, better composer, a better musician, a better producer
and engineer. It drives who I am. |
Rain Perry - A White Album
She says, “It is definitely a concept album. It
is somewhat of a sequel to my album Cinderblock Bookshelves, and
it was a memoir in music about me growing up as a hippie kid raised by
my dad. This record, A White Album, is me looking back at my same
life and my same family, but through the lens of race. It is called A
White Album, because it is me telling my story. I think most larger
topics are best addressed through people and it is my way of wading into
a fraught conversation and to talk about some issues that we seem to be
having a hard time talking about right now.” Although the
common thread is raising awareness of societal issues, the songs on the
album do not come across as preachy or even protestation, but instead
seem to be asking the question, why are we still here after all these
years, far removed from the civil rights movement of the 1960s and yet
in many ways the needle seems to have barely moved. “Thank you, that
is what I was shooting for. I think the best way to empathize is getting
to know somebody and to see the way they are trying to solve the
problems we are all trying to solve, how to be happy, to be fulfilled,
and to be successful in life.
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Madeleine Davis - One of a Kind!
Madeleine Davis had a lengthy career with Boney M (By the Rivers of Babylon, Rasputin) and a small sample of her work in the studio and / or live performances includes artists such as Precious Wilson, Hoyt Axton, Peggy March, Terence Trent D'Arby, Rick Astley, Klaus Doldinger, La Bionda and Amanda Lear. She was in demand by producers such as, Ralph Siegel, Tony Monn, Michael Kunze, Sylvester Levay, Giorgio Moroder and Frank Farian. She sang in church as a young child, acted on stage as a teenager (there is a motorcycle story we will get to in a minute) and she was a soloist with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, while still in university.
“My father was a lot older than my mother. He was fifty-nine when I was
born and he was seventy-five when I was eighteen.
I grew up with a father who was in World War I. He had so much
information for me when I went to school. When he was a paperboy the
Titanic sank,
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