Featured artist: SUSIE ARIOLI
Montreal’s
Susie Arioli and her band that
features guitarist Jordan Officer are not only doing what they
love in life (making music) but are doing something important.
They believe in song, especially the wonderfully crafted songs
from the 1930s and 40s, and are making believers of us. This is
no small accomplishment.
She suspects
that audiences raised on pop, rock and rap are returning to the
Standards because their ears have been deprived of one of the
essential ingredients in any musical diet. Melody. Or the songs
you can sing wherever and whenever. It’s not that she doesn’t
like Purple Haze, she just can’t hum it.
If she
is among the best at what she does, it’s partly because
of her disarming stage presence, the joy she brings to the music
she loves and the quiet authority of a velvety voice that knows
its way around a lyric. And then there’s the music itself
that appeals as much to the heart as the hips. With listeners
from all walks of music tuning in to the American Songbook, Susie
has made its appreciation her mission. And it’s not just
the music, she says. It’s the civilized atmosphere the music
engenders, where people can dance face to face and get to know
each other without having to log-in to a chat-room, where in-between
sets the human voice doesn’t have to compete with anti-social,
decibel-heavy background music.
Her latest
album, entitled Susie Arioli Band, is available at
Justin Time Music. It features
The Way You Look Tonight, the haunting Nuages, That's For Me and
many others.
Click
here to listen to one of my favorites: NOW
I KNOW
