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Angelica Matveeva

Angelica Matveeva is a versatile singer, composer and lyricist whose specialty and artistic goal lies in creating and carrying out concept projects.

Angelica was born on August, 25th 1985 in Moscow (Russia) to an Armenian father and a Russian mother, has been partly raised in Belgium, started her career in Stockholm (Sweden) and during stays in Italy, Poland, Turkey and Finland collaborated with musicians from these countries.

Currently Angelica is based in Tromsø, Norway.

Angelica's debut album "Swedish poetry goes jazz" was released in April 2011 and consists entirely of her own compositions on Swedish 20th and 21st century poetry. Musically the style is an emotional blend between hard bop and vocalese inspired jazz, with strong and imaginative melodies and non-trivial musical forms, dictated by the forms of the poems. The goal of this project was to combine the endless musical richness of jazz with inspiring and meaningful stories, lyrics that are interesting to listen to.

Her second album Cabaret Français: Cinq Portraits , a tribute to French chanson, has been released in October 2011. There Angelica returned to her musical roots - pure melodramatic pop known for its profoundly emotional, larger-than-life stories put to sing-along catchy, timeless classic melodies with at times a touch of swing.

Her third album has been released on the 26th of January 2015 and its concept is vocalese, a subgenre of jazz where the vocalist interprets originally instrumental improvisations with lyrics. The album Vocalese features not only existing vocalese pieces, but many completely new ones, where Angelica has written her own lyrics to solos by jazz icons Freddie Hubbard, Wayne Shorter, Horace Silver, Franco Ambrosetti, Clifford Brown, Lou Donaldson, Peter Asplund and others.

Besides her musical career, Angelica Matveeva has in 2008 also obtained her Specialist degree in International Relations from Moscow City Government University of Management, and in 2011, a Master's degree in Social Sciences from the Department of Peace and Conflict Research at Uppsala University (Sweden).

Angelica Matveeva is married to Finnish researcher and writer Christer Pursiainen. Together they run the independent music record label/books publishing house Chan Puma House.

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Album Review

Angelica Matveeva: Vocalese

Read "Vocalese" reviewed by C. Michael Bailey


"Vocalese" is defined as, “a style or musical genre of jazz singing wherein words are sung to melodies that were originally part of an all-instrumental composition or improvisation." The grand purveyors of this jazz vocals offshoot include King Pleasure, Eddie Jefferson, Jon Hendricks and Bob Dorough. It is the most “jazzy" of jazz idioms. A grand introduction exists in the aforementioned Eddie Jefferson's Letter From Home (Riverside, 1961). Another grand example is the polyglot Angelica Matveeva's appropriately ...

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Music Magazine Lira (03.06.2011) on debut album Swedish poetry goes jazz "Matveeva's clear, genuine, pretence-free voice coupled with the groovy and emotional music and the serious and long text chunks form an exciting whole. My obvious favourite is Gunnar Ekelöf's "Tag och skriv" [...] . Dagens Nyheter (05.06.2011), Sweden's largest daily, on live performance at Jazz Club Glenn Miller Café with programme from debut album Swedish poetry goes jazz "Swedish jazz flourishes anew", "Impressive compositions" (Dagens Nyheter, 5th of June 2011) Johannes Cornell Uppsala Nya Tidning (20.07.2011) on debut album Swedish poetry goes jazz "Matveeva has an exciting voice and her melodies expand freely, and extra spice to the arrangements is added by the beautiful wind tones of Tane Kannisto on the saxophone and Peter Asplund on the trumpet".

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Photos

Music

Recordings: As Leader | As Sideperson

Vocalese

Self Produced
2015

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Swedish poetry goes...

Chan Puma Records
2011

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Cabaret Français:...

Chan Puma Records
2011

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Wonderyear

From: Vocalese
By Angelica Matveeva

Videos

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