Home » Jazz Musicians » Lissy Walker

Lissy Walker

Lissy Walker is a jazz singer, but her wide-ranging musical interests set her apart from your average chanteuse. She’s been an actress and singer for most of her life and brings a dramatic sensibility to her jazz vocals. Walker's burnished vocals have a hint of restrained passion that suggest country music, but her phrasing, which dances before and after the beat, is pure jazz.Her low-key approach is folky at times, but raw emotion lurks just beneath the surface, adding an alluring tension to her performances.The material is an eclectic mix of songs by Irving Berlin, Johnny Mercer, Randy Newman, Ray Davies, and Nick Drake.

I tend toward happy melodies with sad lyrics or vice versa, tunes that look at both sides of the coin. Several songs deal with mortality, or the ache of a broken heart, but the underlying theme of the album is redemption. How love affects our ability to embrace life and acknowledge the limitations of existence, and that beauty can be found in melancholy...the idea that a broken heart is better than no heart at all.”

Walker produced Life Is Sweet with bassist Jon Evans (Tori Amos, Spencer Day). The arrangements are by Walker and pianist John R. Burr. Drummer Scott Amendola (Madeleine Peyroux) and Grammy nominated guitarist Scott Nygaard complete the basic quartet. Cellist Philip Worman, organ player Julie Wolf (Ani Di Franco), trumpeter Steven Bernstein (Rufus Wainwright,Sexmob), and Dave Ellis on sax added discreet overdubs.

The result is a quiet classic, with the musicians placing their restrained virtuosity in the service of Walker's subtle vocals to deliver an album that keeps revealing its emotional and musical intensity with repeated listenings.

Tags

34
Album Review

Lissy Walker: Wonderland

Read "Wonderland" reviewed by Bruce Lindsay


Alice had many adventures in Wonderland: they could be fun, they could be touching, but they were seldom musical. Lissy Walker's second album, Wonderland, also provides lots of adventures--some fun, some touching, all musical.A quick glance at the song titles--"Something Wonderful," “Where Or When," “Isn't It Romantic?"--put this album fairly and squarely into American Songbook territory. A quick glance at the instrumentation--lap steel guitar, 12-string guitar, mandolin--suggests that the territory is a bit further out west. But there's ...

342
Take Five With...

Take Five With Lissy Walker

Read "Take Five With Lissy Walker" reviewed by AAJ Staff


Meet Lissy Walker: Lissy Walker grew up in Berkeley, California. She studied piano and theatre as a child, and later formed her first jazz band under the tutorship of the legendary Phil Hardymon at Berkeley High School. She went on to study voice and theatre at UCLA and The Neighborhood Playhouse in NYC. She was in numerous theatrical productions, from New York's Public Theatre to San Francisco's American Conservatory Theatre. Lissy sang in bands, choirs, and musicals ...

280
Album Review

Lissy Walker: Life Is Sweet

Read "Life Is Sweet" reviewed by Bruce Lindsay


Life Is Sweet is the debut from Berkeley, California-based vocalist Lissy Walker. In an increasingly crowded pool of female jazz singers it's important to stand out from the norm: two things about Life Is Sweet ensure that Walker can do that. Firstly, there is Walker's song selection--a tasteful and unusual mix of standards and more left-field but high quality tunes. Secondly, there's her voice--a subtle but unmistakable hint of country music gives it a distinctive and emotive quality. At times, ...

Read more articles

Recording

Lissy Walker Returns With "Wonderland" Another Sublime Collection Of Classic, Soulful Folk/Jazz September 23

Lissy Walker Returns With "Wonderland"    Another Sublime Collection Of Classic, Soulful Folk/Jazz  September 23

Source: Lissy Walker

Lissy Walker is a jazz singer, but she brings her own unique spin to the music by adding elements drawn from the worlds of folk, country, and 70s acoustic pop. Walker's burnished vocals and her virtuosic band slip effortlessly between genres to create their own soulfully sweet sound–dreamy and bittersweet, heartfelt and swinging–on her stunning new recording, Wonderland. For most of us, the word wonderland conjures up images of Lewis Carroll's surrealistic fables, as well as a dizzying array of ...

251

Recording

Jazz/Folk Chanteuse Lissy Walker to Release Debut CD, "Life is Sweet," on Feb. 9

Jazz/Folk Chanteuse Lissy Walker to Release Debut CD, "Life is Sweet," on Feb. 9

Source: Terri Hinte Publicity

After an acting and singing career that took her from Berkeley High to New York's Public Theater to San Francisco's ACT, Lissy Walker has returned to her hometown and to her musical roots. On Wednesday, March 10, she will celebrate the release of her sublime debut album Life Is Sweet with a performance at the new Freight & Salvage on Addison Street in the heart of Berkeley's downtown Arts and Cultural District. The show will be a true homecoming for ...

"Jazz, folk, and country are fused beautifully on Lissy Walker's debut album Life Is Sweet...emotional, lovely, dreamy, sweet...Lissy's vocals are simply beautiful." Wilbert Sostre, JazzTimes

"Sweet indeed. Jazz songstress Lissy Walker has a distinctly sweet voice, with some impressive technical chops." Kirsty Evans, East Bay Express

"...Life Is Sweet (is) an eclectic riff on the vocal jazz tradition that finds Walker wrapping her sassy, playful voice around standard and not-so-standard tunes.." David Becker, The Examiner

"... Walker has a voice that brings out the subtle nuances of the songs she sings,with jazzy arrangements that are flavored with folk, pop, and country music." j

Read more

Photos

Music

Recordings: As Leader | As Sideperson

Wonderland

Dogwood Records
2014

buy

Life Is Sweet

Strawberry Canyon Records
2010

buy

Get more of a good thing!

Our weekly newsletter highlights our top stories, our special offers, and upcoming jazz events near you.