(Newswire.net — August 11, 2014) Hoboken, New Jersey —
Jazz has and rich a varied history, from field hollers to bordellos, from Carnegie Hall to 57th street, from intimate private parties to large concert venues. The music and the instrumentalists bring fresh sounds, the singers bring feelings and bring you to the moment at hand in a myriad of ways.
Jazz Singers have a particular place in American culture, from the early days of tin pan alley to todays sophisticated hybrid of styles, a Jazz Singer brings to mind just about everything but Rock and Roll, Opera, Country and Folk .
With a palette broad as the blues and a brush soft as a balled, as well as the ubiquitous swing that is unteachable, the jazz singer has the freedom to explore time signature changes, deconstruction of regular song forms and improvised poetry that other more structured forms just don’t allow.
So, we have a genre that is as undefinable without using stylistic phrases, like R and B influences, blues influences, be bop influences, Great American Songbook influences and the like.
The music buying public has such a overabundance of “product” these days, and the music business has undergone a revolutionary shift in the way music is marketed. The technology explosion has given artists tools they never had before without strings attached and there are many singers producing work they just couldn’t have done before Google and the digital surge.
In the old days a singer, any singer really, had to have a look, a bag of money coming from somewhere, a hit record or a rich partner to back their career. Now, with all the technology within the reach of anyone with a desire to learn it, an artist can create work and just put it out there, for no other reason than self expression, and let the chips fall where they may.
Women, so long undervalued in the jazz world except for a few poster girls, are now are creating work, self producing and self promoting and finding channels to expose their creative ideas. You Tube has given everyone a platform to host their ideas.
Sarah James, a jazz singer and producer, is one of those artists who mixes media, images, photographs, sounds, poetry, spoken word and compositional elements together in video. With a background of straight ahead jazz singing and the blues, she adds her spoken word to the mix.
Her music, songs and photographs of graffiti, mostly shot in NYC, are featured on her web site:
Jazz Women and Media Conference will be held in NYC, in the late fall. The date has not been released yet. There will be panel discussions, video screenings and live performances by women artists in the jazz genre.
http://www.whitediamondmedia.com