THE SLOW CLUB QUARTET: The New Jazz Expressionist Movement
Expressionism, the Slow Club Quartet's newest, is now available!
The Slow Club is a dark and moody jazz spot on the Rue du Rivoli in Paris. A winding staircase takes one down into it for an experience not to be forgotten.
So it is with The Slow Club Quartet and their debut recording of the same name, The Slow Club, a canon of original jazz compositions that speaks to the dark and moody in each of us. The Slow Club Quartet are singer/songwriter Angela Carole Brown, pianist Ed Czach, bassist Don Kasper, and drummer Craig Pilo.
"During these eleven tracks, Brown is as expressive a vocalist as she is inventive a composer. With a gifted musician's verve and a clever poet's ambition, she artfully spans adventurous, whimsical bebop (the enchanting A Kid And Her Dog; the vivacious Baser Instincts), smoky, languorous, jazz balladry (The Slow Club, Rest Your Head) and tales of love, both elusive (Presently Thinking) and malodorous (listen to I've Got Something Here For You and remember never to cross this woman!). Brown's tangy, impassioned voice is irresistible, her supporting cast of musicians brilliant.
"In her CD liner notes, Brown writes that she only discovered Jazz at a pivotal juncture in her life. Yeah, right. I believe this chick emerged from the womb swinging. You can't teach this kind of soul and sass; either you have it or you don't. Listening to Brown express the music that flows through her veins is a treat, entrancing and fulfilling."
––– Steven Ivory, music and art journalist
And they've just released Expressionism, the movement expanded, with their new cross-genre CD of favorite songs from other artists. Jimi Hendrix, Joni Mitchell, and Elliott Smith, to name a few, have been given The Slow Club Quartet's uniquely expressionistic stamp.
On the beginnings of The Slow Club Quartet
Singer/songwriter Angela Carole Brown wrote the title track, The Slow Club, before she’d ever been aware that there actually was a Slow Club in Paris. She had been under the impression that she was writing fiction. When a chance encounter revealed the remarkable phenomenon to her, that this place of her invention really did exist, she promptly boarded a plane and went to this place of her haunting, and discovered every detail that she speaks of in the song before her very eyes, from the winding staircase that takes one down into it, to the smoky blue ambience that invited secret rendezvous on the stairs. And as the song bids, Angela promptly ordered a sloe gin, indulged in a slow dance, grinned from ear to ecstatic ear at the wonders of her life, and couldn’t help entertaining delirious notions that she might very well have been that Slow Club chanteuse in another lifetime, simply recalling pockets of memory from a long-dormant nether-plane.
That composition was only the beginning. A whole slew of songs poured out of Angela shortly following that phenomenon in an era of her life when she first began discovering the mesmerizing world of jazz, and uncovering the dense and challenging harmonic environment that is jazz, and which sounded great and weird and dissonant and exciting to her. She'd sit there and analyze what each chord, phrase, and cadence meant, and then break just as many rules as she'd learned, employing very early on the principles of the rebellious expressionist movement, beckoning Angela to call this new sound jazz expressionism:
Expressionism: extreme reaction against realism or naturalism, presenting a world distorted under the influence of intense personal moods, ideas, and emotions: image and language thus expressing feeling and imagination rather than representing external reality. A common agenda of expressionism is with the eruption of irrational and chaotic forces from beneath the surface of a mechanized modern world.
By her own admission, Angela was a wide-eyed yearling, stumbling, tripping, getting back up, inviting this new horizon that was filled with delicious discoveries, and slowly but surely getting her sea legs as a composer.
Next she needed musicians to make these songs come alive. After years of different incarnations and a period of musical hibernation, enter Ed Czach, Don Kasper, and Craig Pilo, all friends she had known over the years from being gigging L.A. musicians, and a remarkable trio of players whose widely differing musical personalities came to blend perfectly with each other and Angela’s voice, to create a jazz experience that truly does erupt with the "irrational and chaotic forces from beneath the surface of a mechanized modern world."
The Slow Club Quartet formed in 2003 to showcase the writing of Angela Carole Brown and, eventually, the arranging talents of Ed Czach, Don Kasper, and Craig Pilo.
They released The Slow Club in December of 2004, on Rue de la Harpe Records. It was released under Angela Carole Brown's name, but shortly thereafter, inspired by the title track and the mystic allure of its Parisian namesake, the musicians on the recording became known as The Slow Club Quartet.
In 2005 The Slow Club became Music Industry News Network's "Best of the Batch."
And in 2006 The Slow Club was nominated for a Just Plain Folks Music Award, and The Slow Club Quartet invited to perform at the legendary Playboy Jazz Festival.
"In our age of reality TV hype and focus group music marketing, the vocal prowess of Angela Carole Brown (ACB) wafts into my living room like an invigorating aroma. On her recent recording, THE SLOW CLUB, Los Angeles based ACB shows a remarkable breadth and depth of artistic vision, beginning with an arresting abstract acrylic painting on the disc's front cover. Inspired from deep within the bowels of the Slow Club in Paris, France, ACB's canon of songs pivots easefully from the laid back neo-soul-shuffle of the title track, for example, to the breakneck-speed scat on the somewhat autobiographical 'A kid and her dog':
"'Betwixt and between rolling on the ground making mud pies ...
'If you really want to know the truth of it all ...
'She was a good kid ...
'Watching ballerinas in movies...
'So she puts on her very own show ...'
"Her eleven originals are wonders of lyrical artifice and invention, betraying a preference for bebop, swing, Afro-Cuban and funk conventions, among other genres.
"What sets ACB apart from her peers, however, is her obvious ability to interpret a lyric. On the basis of her own work, it is fair to say that she would easily lend to the jazz standards her own unique readings. For this, she utilises a powerful range of techniques, including near-flawless articulation, poise, great intonation and purposeful pauses and inflections. Needless to say, ACB is a professionally trained actress.
"It shows!
"Her mannered diction and narrative skills are heard to great effect on 'Van Gogh's Ear', a post-modern tale about artistic license and fate. In fact, the manner in which all her lyrics are written is unusual and captivating, referencing anything from Shakespeare to Dylan Thomas."
"ACB is accompanied by high-quality sidemen who swing like the gallows and really know how to groove hard: Craig Pilo's masterful flourishes on the drum set stand out; Ed Czach and Billy Childs tease forth fantastic chord progressions at the ivories; West Coast woodwind wizard Bob Sheppard blows up a storm.
"THE SLOW CLUB eloquently represents ACB as a multi-faceted, well-kept secret on today's jazz scene. She deserves to be embraced by anyone whom appreciates jazz at its most creative and potent."
––– J. Stevenson, EJAZZNEWS, England
The Slow Club Quartet creates a music with a sort of dual personality that seems to be, at once, moody and irascible AND playful and lighthearted (this even extends to their versions of covers). It is the total reflection of the ecstasy of the new kids on the block, though they are hardly children. A euphoria fully backed and sponsored by the spooky allure of Angela's title track, which was the beginning of it all, the catalyst for a jazz adventure, and the wonders that art simply begets.
The Slow Club Quartet has performed live at:
The Playboy Jazz Festival 2006
"Jazz Under the Stars" Catalina Island Summer Jazz Series
and in clubs throughout L.A.
And has been heard on:
Paris Live Radio with Don Foster
Chicago’s 90.9 WDCB
Tee-m’s “Unsigned Music Show”
WPMD’S “ROCK 50” with Mike Stark
Cybro Radio
Lagniappe Jazz
“The Upper Room with Joe Kelley,” WVOF, Connecticut
Blossom's Vocal Jazz - Live 365, Florida
And has been reviewed by:
Douglas Norstrom for Hifi & Muzik Magazine, Sweden
John Stevenson for ejazznews, England
Karl Stober for Jazztrenzz and Jazzreview.com
Leonard Herring, Jr. of Clarion Jazz
Maurice Edwards for Evolution of Media
Steven Ivory, music and art journalist