Kelli Rudick Comes to Amnesia in the Mission

Each week, I get a ton of email about music, films, theater and gallery openings. So many in fact, I can't possibly read them all. Once in a while however, I'll get one that intrigues me and just I have to delve deeper. This week, it's the NYC Experimental/Neo Classical artist Kelli Rudick. I'm always amazed by women who are phenomenal instrumentalists and after watching her You Tube videos, Kelli proved she is the real deal. I must credit Adam Baer for sending me the following info on Kelli, who will be playing new material as well as works from her first album at upcoming live performances across the US this Spring and here in San Francisco, where she will headline a stellar line-up of thoughtfully virtuosic musicians at Amnesia in the Mission on June 11th.

Ahead of the curve of New York's burgeoning multi-genre intermix, Kelli's show will feature her virtuosic, complex and inimitable solo guitar work, as well as a one woman sonic immersion created with guitars, loop station, array mbira, and nail violin. The indie / neo-classical artist has played shows across the country, including New York's the Knitting Factory, Blue Note and Joe's Pub; LA's Hotel Cafe; Seattle's Triple Door; and San Francisco's Cafe Du Nord. She recently completed her second US tour as well as an appearance at the Mother Music Festival in Tel Aviv. Kelli returns to California for engagements in Los Angeles, San Diego and San Francisco.

In her ex-industrial Brooklyn loft strewn with guitars and all manner of odd instruments, Kelli creates beautifully crafted and intensely driven compositions. Born in the states but raised in Israel, she spent endless hours playing in the echoing sound of the bomb shelter just outside the family’s house on the outskirts of Tel Aviv. After fulfilling her mandatory military service, Kelli moved back to the US and worked to create alternate playing styles through inventive fingerwork and variant tunings, creating a unique and inimitable musical style. In Brooklyn Kelli continued to develop her unusually powerful and expressive techniques. Using every timbre the instrument has to offer by slapping, tapping, bending, restringing and de-tuning, she causes the instrument to morph and transcend possibility in her hands.

In 2007 Kelli released ‘No One Knows You’re Foreign’, a distinctive work introducing her unique way of accentuating emotionally complex compositions by drawing percussive rhythms from the fretboard and body of the guitar while coaxing chordal melodies and harmonics from the strings. The cumulative effect of this soundscape reveals transcendently beautiful dimensions in an anomolous approach to guitarwork. Live shows in support of this record include intricately crafted arrangements for solo guitar as well as looping beats, bass lines and string driven sound progressions, creating captivating atmospheres though multi-layered melodic structures.

Kelli has collaborated with notable artists including Nick Zammuto of the aleatoric electro-folk duo The Books, Alon Leventon of the project Drops of Conciousness and the electro-indie group Zigmat, and recorded and toured with internationally acclaimed guitarist Kaki King. She’s scored music for Queer Eye For The Straight Girl, Showtime’s hit series ‘The L Word’, and the independent films ‘A Night in the Sunlight’ and 'Absolutely I Do'. Kelli has toured throughout the United States and Europe, and has played extensively in her adopted hometown including shows on the main stage of The Knitting Factory, Galapagos, the Cutting Room, a month-long residency at the Living Room, and fronting her seven piece band at the Blue Note in New York City.

Supporting Kelli at this show is Sean Smith & the Present Moment. Guitarist, composer and improviser Sean Smith has produced several masterful solo-guitar albums since 2005 with his powerfully emotive instrumental songs. He is heavily rooted in the school of Takoma and John Fahey, but never limited to it. Like Kelli Rudick, Sean Smith’s music always pushes the boundaries of instrumental songcraft and technique, speaking profoundly in wordlessness. Sean shows two very different sides of his oeuvre at this show, with one set on solo guitar and another together with his new trio, The Present Moment.

Diego Gonzalez, another stunningly exceptional instrumental artist, joins the bill to perform a solo set on Bass and Oud. He is best known for his work with the noted experimental indie band Citay, as well as the indie / neo classical act The Dry Spells. Gonzalez is an astoundingly talented multi-instrumentalist, who will perform a set of solo material for this evenings show.

Kelli continues writing and recording for her upcoming 2nd release, which adds new dimensions to her work and is a definitive evolution from her earlier record. Accelerating the delicately complex terrain of her first recording, the new songs add precise string arrangements, driving basslines, steely layers of variant guitars, array mbira, nail violin, and powerful drums to her distinctive chordal compositions. Don't miss this one.


Kelli Rudick with Sean Smith & the Present Moment and Diego Gonzales
Amnesia in the Mission
June 11th @ 9:00 pm
853 Valencia St., San Francisco, CA 94110
$8 21+ to enter

Rachelle Revisited

One of the best singers I have ever heard, (and I've heard a lot of them) is the extraordinary Rachelle Farrell. Though she is largely obscure outside of jazz circles (particularly those connected to the festival circuit), Rachelle Ferrell is unquestionably one of the most dynamic talents in contemporary pop music. Very few vocal artists in the industry have Ferrell's potent combination of range, phrasing, and musicianship (she is also and accomplished pianist). Such potency was made powerfully aware to Blue Note Record's head Bruce Lundvall who first heard Ferrell on a demo tape (while driving to the supermarket) and signed her shortly thereafter in 1990 after seeing her perform in Germantown, Pennsylvania. So impressed was Lundvall with her talents, that he signed Ferrell to both the Blue Note Label and the Capitol Label allowing her to funnel her talents through the prism of traditional jazz and R&B.

In short, Rachelle Ferrell's talents transcend generic classification and Lundvall had the foresight to realize such a fact. Lundvall quickly set out to plan Ferrell's coming out party via a showcase at the 1991 Montreux Jazz Festival. In the past, the showcase was used to introduced the talents of Dianne Reeves (also signed to both labels), Stanley Jordan, and Gonzalo Rubalcaba. Live at Montreux 91-97 captures Ferrell's moving debut at Montreux in July of 1991 and subsequent performances at the venue throughout the decade of the 1990s. Ferrell first emerged in the states with her R&B debut Rachelle Ferrell (1992), a solid collection of self-penned originals that featured a striking duet with Will Downing ("Nothing Has Ever Felt Like This"). It was with the release of First Instrument in 1994 (recorded prior to Rachelle Ferrell) that audiences were really introduced to Ferrell's jazz sensibilities.

Many of the tracks eventually recorded for First Instrument were part of Ferrell's program at Montreux in 1991 (she was backed by the Eddie Green trio in both cases), but the live material offers listeners, particularly those who have never heard Ferrell "live", to witness her simply extraordinary live performances. However accomplished Ferrell's studio recordings have been, the studio is simply incapable of capturing an artistic sprit that refuses to be contained and limited by the constraints of making a record. Live in Montreux 91-97 opens with a dutiful hard-bopped rendition of the Sam Cooke classic "You Send Me" which Ferrell sings so effortlessly and gleefully that it's a wonder that more jazz vocalists haven't recorded versions of the song. Ferrell's rather pedestrian (by her standard) scat finish initially gets a solid rise out of the crowd. The standard "You Don't Know What Love Is", similarly gets backed by a spare hard groove courtesy of Tyrone Brown on bass, as Green's bright piano lines are shadowed by Ferrell's dark hues throughout the first half of the track. But it is Ferrell who brightens up after Green's solo, dancing melismatic flourishes on-top of Green and Brown's vamp.

Simply whetting the curiosity of the crowd, Ferrell is well into her thing with the original "Don't Waste Your Time". On the fast paced tuned Ferrell show that she loses neither her timing nor her gift for nuance as the groove begins to overheat (again courtesy of a Green solo). It is in the midst of the song's pulsating close that Ferrell first gets the audience off their feet as she displays the triple-octave screech that has made her such an extraordinary live performer. In some regards "Don't Waste Your Time" is just a set-up for her off-the-chart version of "Bye-Bye Blackbird". Again matching the triple espresso pace set by Brown, midway through, Ferrell vocals literarily apes the sounds of birds in frenzy. But it's the closing of the song (impressive even on First Instrument) that Ferrell, during her first Montreux become Rachelle Ferrell. Seemingly pacing herself through 30 seconds of scats as if she was measuring her tour de force moment, Ferrell unleashes a flurry of bird sounds finally punching out over and over the phrase "Black Bird" (24 fours times by my count) as her lungs sound as if they are about to collapse for lack of air. It is this kind of stream of consciousness modernist frenzy -- where Miles Davis should have met the great Shirley Caesar -- that really sets Ferrell apart from contemporary Jazz vocalists, save rare moment with Al Jarreau.

Despite her ability to hang when the pace is amped, Ferrell perhaps best distinguishes herself on ballads. Ferrell introduces the Rodgers and Hart classic "My Funny Valentine" as a song done by "everybody's mothers sisters grandmothers first cousins aunts kid's sons" before doing a version so personalized that it exists as an aura around her. Dripping like some gin-drenched molasses, Ferrell sings "is your figure less than Greek / Is your mouth a little weak?" and a host of the song's lyrics like a lazy Sunday morning that promises redemption and salvation, without ever having to leave the comfort of Nana's quilt. (You can almost hear Gwendolyn Brooks somewhere in the background saying "When you have forgotten Sunday…"). On her own composition "I Can Explain", which was included on her most recent studio disc Individuality (Can I Be Me?) (2000), Ferrell is also on the piano, giving the audience a glimpse at her dual genius. Ferrell almost stops time midway through the song with the lyric "you wanted me all to yourself / I just found out, you've got somebody else", holding the last syllable for nearly 13 seconds.

Alongside her finish of "Bye, Bye Blackbird", Ferrell's performances of "My Funny Valentine" and "I Can Explain" are the clear highlights of Live at Montreux 91-97. Ferrell is joined by longtime collaborator George Duke on "I'm Special" a track that would later appear on Rachelle Ferrell. Duke is also on keyboards for Ferrell's version of Cy Coleman's "With Every Breath I Take" (drawn from Ferrell's appearance at Montreux in July of 1997. Also taken from that appearance are Ferrell's performances of "Me Viola Seul" and "On Se Reveillera" (both in French) backed by members of the WCR Big Band Cologne. There was a six-year gap between the releases of First Instrument and Individuality, so the release of Live in Montreux 91-97 is a welcomed release from an artist who admittedly has had less than a consistent presence in the studio. Live in Montreux 91-97 is a literally "best of" more so because it captures Ferrell at her best -- on stage and pushing the boundaries.