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 Jazz singing is a notoriously difficult genre to define, and Ann Dyer hasn't made it any easier.
Ever since the release of her 1995 debut, ''Ann Dyer & No Good Time Fairies'' on her Mr. Brown label, Dyer has stretched the
possibilities of jazz vocals, incorporating new material and elements of classical Indian music to create a highly personal sound. |
With the release last
year of ''Revolver: A New Spin,'' her gorgeous reinterpretation of the landmark 1966 Beatles album, the San Francisco-based singer became a walking challenge
to the music industry.
Though she's been named Talent Deserving Wider Recognition four consecutive years by Down Beat magazine, Dyer is the
kind of artist many labels are afraid of - independent-minded and package-resistant. Last summer, Dyer hooked up with Premonition, a Chicago-based label with a
reputation for developing hard-to-pigeonhole artists.
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Hindustani Techniues
"The first thing that attracted me was her originality," says Michael Friedman, president of Premonition. "I loved how she used the Hindustani techniques in such a musical way. And to be able to approach the beautiful melodies and songs on 'Revolver' and reinvent them in her own way - it's pretty special.
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 When an artists shows interest in reaching out beyond the small group of people that appreciate jazz, it's
not what I base a decision on, but that's something we think about." |
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Creative Company
"I remember telling someone a few years ago, 'I want to find a company where the people are as creative as we are on stage,' Dyer says during an interview at a sunny Solano Avenue cafe near Berekeley. "I felt that was my key to success and survival.
 As much as my band likes to turn
things around and look at it from every angle, I felt like I wanted to be with a record company that has really bright, creative people involved."
Premonition has an excellent track record for advancing careers of quirky, insistently idiosyncratic artists, such as Chicago
pianist-vocalist Patricia Barber. Blue Note was so interested in working with Barber, the high-powered jazz label a special joint
distribution deal with Premonition. But where Barber has made her reputation with a cool, detached, sardonic style, Dyer is a
singer who embraces emotion. Indeed, recently her music has taken a soul-baring turn. For her performance Saturday at San
Francisco's Florence Gould Theater, the centerpiece of her home season before she begins touring nationally, Dyer has
borrowed the concert's title, ''Of Love and Other Demons,'' from a Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel. |
There's no
direct connection between her music and Garcia Marquez's characters, except that, like the Nobel Prize-winning novelist, she seeks to capture the complexity of
human experience.
''A song I'm singing that maybe I would not have sung five or 10 years ago,'' Dyer says, ''is Cole Porter's 'So in Love,'
which has a stanza - 'So taunt me and hurt me/ Deceive me, desert me/ I'm yours till I die.' I'm not exactly encouraging that. But on the other hand, that's a
very real experience, it's a very common human experience that a lot of people have suffered through.''
Dyer performs with a harmonically
spacious trio featuring bassist John Shifflett and drummer Jason Lewis, plus special guest Deepak Ram, a master of the Indian flute, or bansuri. Another
element is Dyer's collaboration with Bay Area choreographer Erika Shuch, who ''wafts in and out, interpreting what I express vocally,'' Dyer says. ''She's
approaching the music in exactly the same way as the musicians.''
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Relationships
The music ranges from Dyer's original pieces to transformed pop tunes, jazz standards and songs from ''Revolver.'' The thread that ties the disparate elements together is the sense of openness to the confusion, pain and joy of relationships, romantic and otherwise. In a poem of Dyer's that she set to music, she borrows a line from Rumi that describes ''the thrill of licking the honey from the knife,'' which captures the combination of danger and pleasure she hopes to evoke in her performance.
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 ''I think it's a reaction to the '90s, a decade where terms like 'politically correct,'
'dysfunctional family' and 'healthy detachment' flourished,'' Dyer says, ''these kinds of notions of trying to lead a very pristine life.
I think it has its good side, but this concert is very much about the messiness and the grit and the juice of being human.''
Article appeared in the San Jose
Mercury News on March 31,2000.
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