REMEMBERING LADY DAY - 50 YEARS FEATURING MADELEINE PEYROUX

FEATURING:
Madeleine Peyroux, vocals & guitar
Bruce Barth, keyboards
David Finck, bass
Lewis Nash, drums
Russell Malone, guitar
Marcus Strickland, tenor saxophone
Avishai Cohen, trumpet
TBA, background vocals
Oded Lev-Ari, musical director

Madeleine Peyroux [pronounced like the country Peru] was born in Athens, Georgia, she grew up between Brooklyn, Southern California and Paris, though it was in the City of Light where she found her voice. As a teen she was drawn to street music, and in 1989 she started to perform with a group of buskers. She then joined the Lost Wandering Blues & Jazz Band, becoming the only female in the group, which toured around Europe for several years.

Madeleine burst onto the recording scene in 1996, with her stunning debut album Dreamland. Madeleine was greeted with a veritable torrent of gushing reviews. Most raved about her smoke-and-whiskey vocals, often comparing her to the late, great Billie Holiday. Others wondered how someone so young could perform classic songs by Holiday, Bessie Smith and Patsy Cline so convincingly as to make them sound like her own. Time magazine pronounced the groundbreaking Dreamland "the most exciting, involving vocal performance by a new singer this year."

Madeleine, then an American who had been living in Paris as a street musician, suddenly found herself on the fast track to fame. Appearances at Lilith Fair and jazz festivals, and opening tours for Sarah McLachlan and Cesaria Evora followed, while Dreamland's sales reached an impressive 200,000 copies worldwide. "It was great," recalls Madeleine. "I got to perform with fantastic musicians. I got to see Nina Simone live. I could've kept running with it, but instead I stepped back and took a breather."

Careless Love on Rounder Records released in Sept. 2004, eight years after the release of Dreamland. Waiting that long to release her sophomore album is admittedly not a typical career move, but then Madeleine is not a typical artist.

Careless Love, produced by Larry Klein (Joni Mitchell, Shawn Colvin), will features songs as old as W. C. Handy's bluesy title track, popularized by Bessie Smith in the late 1920s, and others as recent as Elliott Smith's folky "Between the Bars." Madeleine also covers material as diverse as Hank Williams' "Weary Blues" and Leonard Cohen's "Dance Me to the End of Love."

Madeleine spent much of the time between Dreamland and Careless Love out of the public eye. But she never stopped singing, returning to her busking roots with street performances and club dates around the world from Los Angeles (to New Orleans to New York City) to Western Europe before being signed by Rounder Records in 2003.

Careless Love was a worldwide sales and critical success, putting Madeleine back on fame's fast track.

Madeleine's followed up Careless Love with Half the Perfect World, released Sept. 2006, again pairing Madeleine and producer Larry Klein. Half the Perfect World builds on and expands on the direction set with Careless Love, featuring a broad range of songwriters include Madeleine herself.

Her latest release, Bare Bones, is the third album in four years, and is both an extension of the currents of 2004's Careless Love and 2006's Half the Perfect World and a bold step into previously unexplored psychological terrain. Produced, like its two predecessors, by Larry Klein, this fluid and enthralling new work, is Peyroux's most personal yet, hardly surprising considering she had a hand in writing each of the 11 songs, marking the fulfillment of a lifelong dream.

"This really is a new experience for me. It's almost as if I got to make my first record again," she says. "Larry really was the first person who ever said to me, 'Let's write every song on the record, you should do this.' I'd co-written with Larry a couple of times in the past, but this was a big leap for me as a writer, and also a deep exploration as a co-writer," Peyroux continues, "not only in the experience of writing but also the message I wanted to portray. Like the end of any event; being up all night, or when the rain stops and the sun comes out, it's a transitional moment of getting past some kind of struggle."

When asked to describe the sound of Bare Bones, Peyroux pauses to consider the question for several moments. "The lyrics and the sounds are both honest, so that they match each other. We're really exploring the calm, relaxed attitude, because we tend to fall into a rhythmic pocket that is not exploited much in popular music. Everybody's ahead of the beat, on top of the beat or trying to get to the next beat; everything is short and very repetitive; we're just way slower than all that."