Vocal Double Bill: Sachal Vasandani and Tessa Souter with special guest violinist Todd Reynolds

February 15, 2010

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Sachal Vasandani

“My music always starts off with jazz, but can end up in any number of places because of all my different influences. I guess I value the freedom to explore as much as the discipline of tradition."

–Sachal Vasandani

That's Sachal Vasandani reflecting on the adventure he's embraced on his captivating sophomore CD, We Move, on Mack Avenue Records. Produced with a team of top-flight studio sages (John Clayton, Doug Wamble and Al Pryor), We Move finds the young jazz vocalist (who also serves as a producer) maturing as songwriter, tune stylist and bandleader in the wake of his breakout 2007 debut, Eyes Wide Open (Mack Avenue Records). That exceptional CD made for one of the most startling revelations of the year – a fresh, young vocal talent who displayed a singular, deep-brewed voice and possessed an uncanny sensibility to straddle the fine line between jazz and pop with songs that teemed with emotion and intellect.

In regards to We Move, Vasandani says, "I wanted to continue telling my own story, to write about my own, visceral experiences without force feeding. I tried to share the surface of an emotion but hint at the iceberg below, and then let the listener find their own depth."

After two years of touring and with a renewed confidence in composing and arranging, Vasandani decided it was time to begin We Move. "On the road, I would gather my ideas any way I could, and then lock myself away and mold the music to fit my emotions," says the vocalist who was a semi-finalist in the 2004 Thelonious Monk Institute Competition. "I ended up writing 30 to 40 songs in all kinds of styles and about all kinds of topics."

Tessa Souter

Artist website HERE

"I would not now be a singer, had I not lived in San Francisco in my 30s. And although I sometimes wish I'd started earlier, I think coming to it late was a good thing for me," says  London-born, New York-based, Anglo-Trinidadian singer Tessa Souter, who has been praised as much for the life experience she evidently brings to her music, as for her "strikingly beautiful voice, which really serves great lyrics, using the beauty of her voice to unearth and get to the core of great songs.” [Sirrius Radio]

Her unique style, which infuses jazz with the soul and passion of flamenco, Middle Eastern and Brazilian music, is born of her interesting life story. And her new CD, 'Obsession'--a multicultural banquet that reflects her African, Indian, and English bloodlines--is her third, in an international singing career that has taken her, in a relatively short time, all over the world, playing to sold out houses from the Blue Note, New York to Beirut to Moscow and beyond.

Formerly a features journalist for the international press, Tessa was cited by San Francisco author Po Bronson, in his best-selling What Should I Do With My Life, as someone who successfully became her childhood vision of herself. After moving from London to San Francisco in the early 90s, she juggled cleaning houses with penning articles for the London Times, Guardian and Vogue, on such diverse subjects as women taking testosterone and (for the San Francisco-based online magazine Salon) her own experiences as a teen mother, before becoming the sixth member of the now famous literary haunt, the Writer's Grotto.

Despite success as a writer (her book, Anything I Can Do You Can Do Better was published in the UK in 2006, and she is currently working--time allowing in her busy schedule--on a memoir on the discovery at the age of 30 that her birth father was Afro-Trinidadian, not Spanish as she had been led to believe), she never let go of her long-held dream to be a singer. One night she sang at the Mint Karaoke Bar up the road on Market Street, which started a chain of events which led to Tessa moving to New York. There she was mentored for four years by SF native son, jazz vocal legend Mark Murphy, who says of her "she is a true musician, extraordinary and very moving, completely captivating her audience." 

Acclaimed as  "striking, soulful" [Washington Post], “expressive, full of passion" [Philadelphia Inquirer], "compelling ... utterly original" [Jazzwise] and "one of the few exceptional standouts in the crowded field of female jazz singers." [International Review Of Music], Tessa is " a must-see for lovers of world class jazz." [Los Angeles Times]. "Better still, she delivers it with a wit and a wink worthy of the toniest joints in town." (Time Out New York)

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