Rachelle Ferrell, a new voice among us
Wednesday, July 28, 2010 21:48
by Marcia Manna | FroggerDogger.com
Whenever my band performed in my hometown of Chicago, my mother would get a front row seat and watch me sing. She referred to me as “her star,” but there would be criticism, too. “Don’t screw your face up like that when you are going for those high notes,” she would advise. “You’ll scare the audience.”
The memory makes me feel a little self-righteous when I watch vocalist Rachelle Ferrell, who will perform one set tonight and two shows tomorrow at Anthology.
While many vocalists learn to camouflage the physical effort it takes to flavor and empower notes, all in the name of looking pretty and poised, Ferrell is different.
She’s what you would call a singer’s singer, a sister who twists and contorts her wide, full mouth to scat, wail and work her six-octave range to full effect.
Ferrell makes her body her instrument and because of her astounding musicality, her stage presence commands respect.
Check out the youtube clip of her performance at comic/actor Bernie Mac’s (aka Bernard Jeffrey McCullough) funeral, a celebrity-filled event in 2008 that attracted more than 5,000 mourners. Ferrell is in the spirit, pounding a white piano and leading a massive gospel choir in an emotional, call-and-response musical tribute.
Sadly, the success she so deserves has eluded her, though like many black American musicians, she has a fierce following in Europe, due in part to her numerous Montreaux Jazz Festival performances.
Born in 1961 and raised near Philadelphia, Ferrell began writing songs, playing piano and performing professionally in her teens. She attended Boston’s Berklee College of Music, co-taught music classes with Dizzy Gillespie for the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, and sang backup for recording artists such as Patti LaBelle, Vanessa Williams and George Duke.
Ferrell has a reputation for cooking up an original stew of styles by inserting the creativity of jazz improvisation into blues, R&B and pop formats.
On her 1990 Blue Note release, “First Instrument,” she bastes notes with emotion and tampers with tempo in a way that personalizes familiar standards such as Sam Cooke’s “You Send Me” or Rodgers and Hart’s “My Funny Valentine.”
In 2000, Ferrell switches gears by introducing the Capitol Records release “Individuality, (Can I Be Me?),” a funky, bass-poppin’ R&B album co-produced with George Duke. All of the songs are either written or co-written by Ferrell and here again, she infuses danceable groove numbers with a level of vocal technique that makes you wonder, ‘Who is that?”
“Music makes one feel alive,” Ferrell explained last year in a mediaprofil interview at the Montreaux Jazz Festival. “The privilege of being able to be a musician, to be an artist, comes from the privilege of being able to touch another…I don’t take it lightly. The fact that people come in to embrace me and embrace the music – it compels me to give from a place that I didn’t know I had.”
—
–
WHAT: Rachelle Ferrell
WHEN: Thursday, July 28th, 2010
TICKETS 7:30pm: $29 – $54 BUY TICKETS
TICKETS 9:30pm: $26 – $44 BUY TICKETS
MORE INFO: Artist Profile