Curtis Stigers & Eldar
Curtis Stigers is at the forefront of a new generation of jazz singers. With one of the most distinctive voices in music, the singer/saxophonist/songwriter pushes the boundaries of conventional jazz performers and expands the jazz repertory creating modern jazz standards. Curtis continues to blaze a path as one of his generation’s finest and most original interpreters of modern songs.
“This is my niche, my specialty,” says Stigers. “I have a great love and an eclectic knowledge of a wide array of songwriters and musical genres, and I know how to bring them all together into one cohesive sound. I want to follow in the footsteps of my heroes. This is what Ella and Billie Holiday did. This is what Sinatra and Nat Cole did. This is even what Miles and Coltrane and nearly all of the great jazz artists have done. They’ve taken the popular songs of their generation and created something new from them. I know a lot about Rock music and Alt Country and Urban Blues and Folk music and Punk Rock. So I use that knowledge. And that’s what I’m steadily becoming known for.”
Throughout his career, Stigers has been celebrated for a surprisingly wide variety of impressive accomplishments—from his early pop chart success with several self-penned, top-ten singles and hit albums and an appearance on the soundtrack for “The Bodyguard” (one of the biggest selling albums of all time), to Downbeat Magazine naming him as one of the jazz genre’s “Rising Male Stars” and the London Times selecting his last jazz recording, You Inspire Me, as the number one album of 2003. He’s toured the world in concert with such renowned pop artists as Elton John, Eric Clapton, Bonnie Raitt, and Prince, while also sharing the bill with such jazz greats as Nancy Wilson, Randy Brecker, and Toots Thielmans. Stigers has performed on “The Tonight Show” and “The Late Show with David Letterman,” in the United States and ‘Parkinson’ in the United Kingdom and has been called “one of the best male jazz singers of his generation” by JazzTimes. His refusal to stand still, and his consistent desire to grow and evolve musically, has earned him admiration and recognition—and kept critics guessing.
What distinguishes Stigers from many jazz singers today is his ability to craft and create beautiful music of his own.“What I’m after is a complex and ever-changing thing, which makes it difficult to define who I am. I sing beautiful love songs, but I’m not really a crooner. I write, but I’m not just a singer-songwriter. I’m certainly a jazz singer but so much more, too. I grew up on Stevie Wonder and Sarah Vaughn, Johnny Cash and Led Zeppelin, Joni Mitchell and Coleman Hawkins, B.B. King and Elton John, Joe Williams and The Clash, Elvis Costello and Sonny Rollins, Tom Waits and Steely Dan, Louis Armstrong and Ray Charles, and on and on. That’s who I am and there’s nobody else like me. That’s how I want my music to sound. Like me.”
For more information visit: http://www.curtisstigers.com
“Eldar’s velocity is astonishing: totally clean two-handed unison lines at wind-spring tempos, single lines that twist and pivot through jagged harmonies, bass rumbles that erupt and explode into complex passagework in the mid or upper register,” wrote Robert Doerschuk in a 4-star Downbeat review of Live at The Blue Note. “Other pianists have made similar impressions over the past several decades... Nobody, though, has quite reached the impossible, Conlon Nancarrow-like blizzard of stride, parallel chords, embellishments and general fireworks that Eldar ignites in his unaccompanied two-and-a-half-minute rampage through the closer, Take the A-Train... Few musicians on any axe swing like Eldar...his groove is intense and overwhelming. It’s not the flash and fire that should stir interest in Eldar. It’s what he does when the razzle-dazzle dies down and we sense substance within and beyond his pyrotechnics.”
Eldar accesses a wide range of references to tell his stories. As always, he draws on the legends—Oscar Peterson, Art Tatum and Benny Green for orchestral swing and impeccable technique, McCoy Tyner, Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea and Kenny Kirkland for harmonic palette. But Eldar’s heady 21st century brew incorporates information from a broad range of late 20th century sources. Among the pianists he cites as heroes are Gonzalo Rubalcaba, Danilo Perez, Brad Mehldau, Bill Charlap, Esbjorn Svensson, and Jason Moran. Composer-improvisors like Pat Metheny, Michael Brecker, and Kurt Rosenwinkel enter the mix. So does the jazz-hiphop synthesis of Roy Hargrove; the sophisticated pop of Radiohead, Bjork, Sting, Soulive and the Beatles; the classical pianists Evgeny Kissin and Arcadi Volodos.
It makes sense that Eldar feels a particular affinity for the latter pair, both ethnic Russians, and for Rubalcaba, who was trained in Cuba by Russian teachers. Himself of Russian descent, he spent his first ten years in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, a province on the eastern border of the then-Soviet Union, where his father, Emil, was a mechanical engineer and his mother, Tatiana, was a professor of music studies..
“I’m going to be playing jazz, or some form of it, for the rest of my life. It encompasses so much; there’s so much room for self-expression.”
March 2007
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