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Laurie Antonioli

No American jazz singer has traversed a wider array of musical territory over the past five years than the Bay Area’s Laurie Antonioli. Exploring with her vaunted American Dreams Band, she organically transforms any song into a possibility-filled jazz vehicle, a journey that culminated most recently in 2014’s critically hailed Songs of Shadow, Songs of Light (Origin), an album based on the extraordinary music of Joni Mitchell. While named on numerous best-album-of-the-year lists, the album received particularly cherished accolades from Ms. Mitchell herself, who invited Antonioli to perform at SFJAZZ’s May 8 gala celebration in her honor alongside Kris Kristofferson, Kurt Elling, Brian Blade, Joe Jackson, Patti Austin, and Tom Scott, among others.

Antonioli follows up with Varuna (Origin), an album that takes her into very different sonic and emotional spaces. It’s a duo project that reunites her with piano legend Richie Beirach on a collection of utterly reimagined standards, spontaneous inventions, and Beirach originals featuring Antonioli lyrics (German bassist Pepe Berns joins on four of the album’s 13 tracks). In many ways, the album continues an intermittent but always probing musical conversation stretching back nearly three decades, a creatively charged relationship fueled by mutual musical admiration.

“Laurie is the real deal,” Beirach says. “She’s got a rich, elegant, colorful alto voice, great intonation, and amazingly creative and spontaneous phrasing. But most of all, she possesses that unteachable, unexplainable element of humanity deep down in every note she sings.”

Antonioli and Beirach first recorded together in 1992, a startlingly inventive encounter released by Nabel in 2005 as The Duo Session. With Antonioli holding down a professorship at Austria’s KUG University between 2002 and 2006 and Beirach teaching in Leipzig, they performed regularly in top clubs and concert halls around Europe. The prolific Beirach also began giving Antonioli his latest original tunes so that she could write lyrics to them, an activity that has formed the backbone of their creative collaboration. Varuna features three of these songs: the hauntingly cinematic “Inside My Dreams”; the sensuous ballad “My Love”; and the gently flowing title track, which establishes a shimmering feel that pervades the entire album.

RICHIE BEIRACH

A virtuosic player who first gained attention in the early 1970s with Stan Getz and Chet Baker, Beirach is a dauntingly prolific recording artist whose synthesis of Bill Evans and McCoy Tyner is streaked with a darkly romantic classical approach. It’s a sensibility that surfaces most conspicuously on a delectably spacious interpretation of “Haunted Heart,” as well as on an arrangement of Antonioli’s that interpolates Scriabin’s “Prelude in E-Flat Minor” into “My Funny Valentine” in a way that makes the well-worn standard sound utterly new. Their version of Harry Warren’s idyll “Summer Night”—complete with the lovely verse—begs the question of how the song has been so overlooked, while their impromptu version of “Over the Rainbow” throws down a gauntlet for singers who treat it as a chance to soar upward rather than inward.

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11
Album Review

Laurie Antonioli & Richie Beirach: Varuna

Read "Varuna" reviewed by Dan Bilawsky


This absorbing release--an album that's something of a sequel to The Duo Sessions (Nabel Records, 2005)--finds vocalist Laurie Antonioli and pianist Richie Beirach painting one divine musical tableau after another. There are vivid numbers that place Antonioli's seraphic vocals atop Beirach's dense and full-flavored chords, spare readings that allow fragility and the human condition to come to the surface, and standards shaped and molded to this pair's liking. The music is both experiential and experimental, owing to each artist's adventurous ...

13
Album Review

Laurie Antonioli & Richie Beirach: Varuna

Read "Varuna" reviewed by C. Michael Bailey


There is a tuneful Constellation in the West and her name is Laurie Antonioli. Returning to her native Bay Area in 2006 after an expatriate period in Europe where she served as professor of voice at Austria's Kug University, she formed her “American Dreams" band recording, most recently, the well critically well-received albums, American Dreams (Intrinsic Music, 2010) and what is considered her breakout, the excellent Songs of Shadow, Songs of Light: the Music of Joni Mitchell (Origin Records, 2014) ...

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Extended Analysis

Songs of Shadow, Songs of Light: the Music of Joni Mitchell

Read "Songs of Shadow, Songs of Light: the Music of Joni Mitchell" reviewed by C. Michael Bailey


Bay Area vocalist Laurie Antonioli has been performing and recording for more than 30 years. Early on she mixed paints with the likes of Joe Henderson, Mark Murphy and Pony Poindexter with whom she undertook an 8-month European junket in 1980, quickening her already impressive jazz chops. Antonioli's discography is a slim yet intense affair that is full of brilliant pathos and musicianship. She has had much time pass between releases resulting in a sonic career where her evolution as ...

15
Album Review

Laurie Antonioli: Songs Of Shadow, Songs Of Light: The Music Of Joni Mitchell

Read "Songs Of Shadow, Songs Of Light: The Music Of Joni Mitchell" reviewed by Dan Bilawsky


The concept of a jazz-informed program of Joni Mitchell tunes isn't exactly novel anymore. Herbie Hancock's high profile River: The Joni Letters (Verve, 2007) took home two Grammy Awards; vocalist Tierney Sutton got some well-deserved attention when she put her own spin on Mitchell's work with After Blue (BFM, 2013); somewhat under-the-radar releases from artists like David Lahm and Rachel Z have made something of an impact on a smaller scale; and numerous other albums that aren't necessarily built around ...

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Take Five With...

Take Five With Laurie Antonioli

Read "Take Five With Laurie Antonioli" reviewed by Laurie Antonioli


Meet Laurie Antonioli: Whether interpreting American songbook standards, reinventing traditional American songs, or introducing contemporary melodies made vivid with her original lyrics, Antonioli brings her inclusive musical intelligence to bear on every tune. The result is a gorgeous tapestry woven from the raw materials of jazz, folk, country music, Balkan melodies and harmonies, and a style that is entirely original. She's worked and recorded with George Cables, Richie Beirach, and numerous other well known jazz musicians. A singer's singer ...

222
Album Review

Laurie Antonioli: American Dreams

Read "American Dreams" reviewed by Dan McClenaghan


In order to have specifically American Dreams, exile may be necessary. An extended stay in a foreign country lends a certain detached perspective on the homeland. For returning San Francisco-based jazz vocalist Laurie Antonioli, that foreign stay was in Graz, Austria, at KUG University, where she taught vocal jazz from 2002 until 2006.A fortuitous aspect of Antonioli's European stay was her musical hook-up with pianist Fritz Pauer, longtime accompanist to Art Farmer. Pauer also taught at KUG, and ...

203
Album Review

Laurie Antonioli: American Dreams

Read "American Dreams" reviewed by Raul d'Gama Rose


The remarkable ingenuity of Laurie Antonioli's voice is owed, not just to the impossible range--some three octaves--but to vocalist's breathtaking ability to find the hidden quarter tones that sound between the so-called right ones. In suggesting that these notes she sings are “wrong," the idea of a Thelonious Monk-like reality emerges in Antonioli's singing. The elemental difference is one of rhythm: while Monk's was chopped and jagged, sly and askance, Antonioli's is smooth, with burgeoning glissandos that are forthright, yet ...

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2

Recording

Laurie Antonioli's 7th Album, "The Constant Passage Of Time," To Be Released By Origin Records April 12.

Laurie Antonioli's 7th Album, "The Constant Passage Of Time," To Be Released By Origin Records April 12.

Source: Terri Hinte Publicity

Vocalist Laurie Antonioli highlights her gifts as a collaborator and interpreter on The Constant Passage of Time, her seventh album, due April 12 on Origin Records. Joined by her longtime working band American Dreams (with multi-reedist Sheldon Brown, guitarist Dave MacNab, pianist Matt Clark, drummer Jason Lewis, and newest member Dan Feiszli on bass), Antonioli takes on singer/songwriters Sheryl Crow, Joni Mitchell, and Neil Young, as well as featuring her own work as a lyricist with celebrated jazz composers Johannes ...

15

Recording

Laurie Antonioli's "Varuna," A Duo Session With Pianist Richie Beirach, To Be Released By Origin Records Sept. 18

Laurie Antonioli's "Varuna," A Duo Session With Pianist Richie Beirach, To Be Released By Origin Records Sept. 18

Source: Terri Hinte Publicity

Since returning to her native Bay Area in 2006 from a period of living and working in Europe, vocalist Laurie Antonioli has concentrated her creative energies on her American Dreams band, which backed her on last year’s breakthrough Origin Records release Songs of Shadow, Songs of Light. For her new Origin CD, Varuna, Antonioli returns to an important chapter in her musical life by recording intimate sessions with her collaborator of more than 25 years, the esteemed pianist Richie Beirach. ...

3

Recording

Laurie Antonioli Sings The Music Of Joni Mitchell On Her New Origin CD, Due August 19

Laurie Antonioli Sings The Music Of Joni Mitchell On Her New Origin CD, Due August 19

Source: Terri Hinte Publicity

Vocalist Laurie Antonioli delivers the most personal and soul-baring statement of her esteemed career with the release, on August 19, of Songs of Shadow, Songs of Light: The Music of Joni Mitchell. The CD, her first for the Origin label, finds the acclaimed Bay Area jazz singer returning with obvious passion and inspiration to her earliest musical influence. “Joni’s music is such a part of me, it’s like a second skin,” says Antonioli. “So is jazz, of course, but this ...

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Video / DVD

See The Music Of Laurie Antonioli and Richie Beirach

See The Music Of Laurie Antonioli and Richie Beirach

Source: Laurie Antonioli

A short improvisational piece from master pianist Richie Beirach and song stylist Laurie Antonioli taken from their Duo Session recording is a gorgeous series of brush strokes and images that capture the feeling and sound of this song. Laurie is the Director of the Jazzschool Institute Vocal program and her student, Susana Pineda created this video as a gift for her teacher. It turns out that her intuition was stunning as Richie Beirach's favorite artist is Paul Klee. Young Susana, ...

295

Recording

"American Dreams," New CD by Jazz Vocalist Laurie Antonioli, Due June 22 from Her Intrinsic Music Label

"American Dreams," New CD by Jazz Vocalist Laurie Antonioli, Due June 22 from Her Intrinsic Music Label

Source: Terri Hinte Publicity

Deeply valued as a musician's singer throughout her career, Laurie Antonioli is sure to come into wider awareness and appreciation with the release on June 22 of her fourth album, American Dreams. The stunning new disc, on her Intrinsic Music label, is her first U.S. release since 1985's Soul Eyes (a duo album with George Cables) and amounts to a belated and much-welcome American debut. Years in the making, and in the dreaming, American Dreams is an eclectic project held ...

Primary Instrument

Vocals

Willing to teach

Intermediate to advanced

Credentials/Background

Chair, Vocal Jazz Studies, The Jazzschool, Berkeley, California. See jazzschool.com for more information.

Photos

Music

Recordings: As Leader | As Sideperson

The Constant Passage...

Origin Records
2019

buy

Varuna

Origin Records
2015

buy

Songs of Shadow,...

Origin Records
2014

buy

American Dreams

Intrinsic Music
2010

buy

Where Flamingo Fly/Black is the Color

From: Foreign Affair
By Laurie Antonioli

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