Welcome to my music, my debut CD, Vintage Pop and the Jazz Sides, and my live performances. On Vintage Pop…, as in my shows, I blend two musical worlds—classic pop I grew up on, and jazz standards, immortalized by great vocalists, that I’ve come to love as an adult and an artist.
Although I am not trying to imitate, undoubtedly there are influences by a number of great singer-song writers and composers in my music. In the classic pop world, to name a few, are talents like Carol King, Stevie Wonder, James Taylor, Laura Nero and Burt Bacharach, whose songs I heard as a child and whose music I now reinterpret. Theirs is the foundation of my music and the source of what I ultimately came to understand as an art form known as singing.
Jazz was a later “find” for me; not so much an acquired taste as a vocabulary I inherited (or found I already understood) as I began performing. Around this time, I also had my first taste of one of the greatest vocalists of all time, Ella Fitzgerald, when I heard her album “The Best of the Song Books”. A greatest hits album of some of her watershed recordings from the 1950s which set a new and defining standard for popularizing great 20th Century American composers, hearing this recording introduced me the joys of her music in general and ultimately to some fantastic, far more interesting jazz arrangements of the same songs that she recorded on her later, live albums. In this music I recognized an outlet for a natural desire to bend tones and phrasing and to recalculate the time signatures and rhythms of otherwise familiar songs—something I found myself naturally doing (even if I didn’t understand until later what I was attempting). This, for me, is jazz. When I understood this style of interpreting songs and began performing much of my music in this way, I came to feel truly original in my singing.
Now as I select music, including some original material written for me by some very talented new composers, as in Vintage Pop’s “Close to Me”, I am always interested in mixing styles and song choices to create something new. In my music I hope that you hear something different and fresh and unique to me.
So please take a tour of my website. Enjoy my music and, if you like, send me a note. I would love to know that you have been here and welcome your thoughts. Also, always check back on this site for regular updates of my performances. I would love to see you there.
—Andy