Pyeng Threadgill
This week, St. Louis jazz fans have the opportunity to check out two very different female vocalists. Roseanna Vitro, who's performing at Finale on Saturday night, is a jazz singer in the classic mode who draws on an eclectic selection of material ranging from Bill Evans to Randy Newman to the Great American Songbook and the four Bs (blues, ballads, Brazilian music and bebop). An Arkansas native, Vitro is well-known as a jazz educator and clinician, has recorded ten CDs as a leader, and has worked with Kenny Werner, Kenny Barron, Elvin Jones, Fred Hersch, Eddie Gomez, “Fathead” Newman, George Coleman and many others.
In contrast, Pyeng Threadgill, who will make her St. Louis debut with shows Friday and Saturday at Jazz at the Bistro, is a bit harder to categorize. Her first album consisted of Robert Johnson covers, her second was mostly original songs that seem to fit most comfortably into the singer/songerwriter or neo-soul categories, and Jazz Times called her "a New Age cross between Norah Jones and Sade." You can read some press coverage of her current tour here, here and here.
UPDATE - 1:00 a.m., 7/5/06 - Thursday's Post has two pieces on Threadgill, both written by Calvin Wilson and now online at STLtoday. There's a brief interview with Threadgill here and a review of her most recent CD here.
Other noteworthy shows this week include guitarist Todd Mosby's trio at Brandt's tonight, singer Ron Wilkinson at Cookie's Jazz and More on Thursday, and Wild, Cool and Swingin' at Cookie's on Saturday.
And this seems as good a place as any to note that while the Whitaker Music Festival at Missouri Botanical Garden continues tonight and every Wednesday through August 9 with concerts of blues, folk, bluegrass and more, the jazz portion of the concert series is over. Tonight's featured group is the Bel-Airs, a road-tested trio out of Columbia, MO that mixes a bit of everything from rockabilly to New Orleans R&B into their blues - a good band, and one I'd recommend hearing if you enjoy that sort of thing, but definitely not jazz. For all the details on the Whitaker Music Festival, see this post.
For more on what's going in St. Louis jazz this week, see the St. Louis Jazz Notes Calendar.
(If you have calendar items, news tips, links, or anything else you think may be of interest to StLJN's readers, please email the information to stljazznotes at yahoo dot com.)
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