Taxonomy of Pleasure (self-produced)

The Lost American JazzBook featuring Tammi Brown

Released July 24, 2019

18th Independent Music Awards Winner Jazz Album with Vocals

YouTube:

https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_k_qnB9lYb3jdvu3ZX12Igq-K6Aaeg3A8A

Spotify:

https://open.spotify.com/album/0v1rAJR8S4XWd7Sw7IitY7?si=YqtY38IGQhGzZ1o2aa_byg

About:

Albert Greenberg is the creator and principal composer of the award-winning Lost American JazzBook. JazzBook’s latest CD, Taxonomy of Pleasure features jazz and gospel singer Tammi Brown and special guests guitarist Stanley Jordan and violinist Mads Tolling.

Multi Grammy-winning producer Kabir Sehgal writes, “the tradition of jazz became the soundtrack of the 20th century – an era beset by world wars and the systemic scourge of Jim Crow.  Not unlike our troubled time.” (Greenberg) believes that this music can be both a communal force and a prophetic voice—bringing people together from many traditions to form a more “improvisational union”.

Tammi Brown has performed with Quincy Jones, Alan Parsons, Bobby McFerrin, Stanley Jordan, Linda Tillery and the Cultural Heritage Choir and Tom Schuman of Spyro Gyra. She is the new voice of The Lost American JazzBook, a concert of original songs written in the style of the American art song tradition—the jazz standard.  JazzBook was winner of Jazz Vocal Album of the Year from the Independent Music Awards in 2018.

Kabir says of Tammi: “Tammi Brown has a storied career as a performer, equally comfortable with soulful gospel as with modern, forward-pushing jazz. Her refined phrasing and powerful voice have an almost hypnotic effect as she inhabits each song and mesmerizes with fresh renderings.”

Special guest Stanley Jordan is the consummate guitarist, traversing styles and genres from Miles to Hendrix to Bartók. His unique style of “tapping” on guitar opened a whole new world of musical possibilities.

Mads Tolling is a two-time Grammy-winning violinist, and is considered to be one of the finest jazz violinists in the world today. Mads was part of the JazzBook vol 1 ensemble and returns to bring his singular expressive vision to the music. Albert Greenberg collaborated with pianist Dan Zemelman, to create The Lost American JazzBook and its second CD, Taxonomy of Pleasure, featuring seven songs with original lyrics and music, one standard, and one Bob Dylan tune.  The Lost American JazzBook is according to Greenberg, “a revisioning of the “American art song tradition” – the jazz standard – inspired by everyone from Billy Strayhorn to Thelonious Monk to Antonio Carlos Jobim.

Track Listing:

1. Ambassador of Bop (Albert Greenberg / Dan Zemelman) 05:00

2. For Love (Albert Greenberg / Dan Zemelman) 05:22

3. Without You (Albert Greenberg / Dan Zemelman) 05:11

4. Blues & the Bebop (Albert Greenberg / Dan Zemelman) 03:44

5. All the Things You Are (Albert Greenberg / Oscar Hammerstein II / Jerome Kern Dan Zemelman) 04:53

6. Subterranean Homesick Blues (Bob Dylan / Albert Greenberg / Dan Zemelman) 05:51

7. Swank in the Night (Albert Greenberg / Dan Zemelman) 06:26

8. So Long (Albert Greenberg / Dan Zemelman) 06:21

9. Free Fall (Albert Greenberg / Dan Zemelman) 04:18

Personnel:

Tammi Brown: vocals

Dan Zemelman: piano

Stanley Jordan: guitar

Mads Tolling: violin

Matt Renzi: saxophone

Joseph Hébert: cello

Dan Robbins: bass

Alan Hall: drums

Zachary Ostroff: bass

Bryan Bowman: drums

Celso Alberti: percussion

Squid Inc. String Quartet

Recorded at Laughing Tiger Studios, San Rafael, California, by Alberto Hernandez

Photography: Steve Nuzzo

Cover Photo: Victoria Smith

Photo Editing: Nye’ Lyn Tho

Producer: Julie Wolf

Review:

THE LOST AMERICAN JAZZBOOK went on hiatus after its first album, until joined by vocalist Tammi Brown.

THE LOST AMERICAN JAZZBOOK has been rediscovered. Introduced on an eponymous award-winning album in the fall of 2014, the JazzBook was a Bay Area ensemble focusing on original songs by veteran jazz pianist Dan Zemelman and A Traveling Jewish Theater co-founder Albert Greenberg. Sophisticated and gracefully constructed, the tunes were designed to evoke American Songbook standards by the likes of Rodgers and Hart, Antonio Carlos Jobim, Billy Strayhorn, and Johnny Mercer.

While the album won Jazz Vocal Album of the Year honors at the 14th Independent Music Awards, the project faded when vocalist Rose Armin-Hoiland moved on to other pursuits. Enter the brilliant Santa Cruz singer Tammi Brown and Lost American JazzBook’s second iteration, Taxonomy of Pleasure, which picks up where the first volume left off.

An all-star cast celebrates the album’s release at Yoshi’s Wednesday, Aug. 28 when ace bassist Dan Robbins, reed expert Sheldon Brown, Brazilian guitarist Ricardo Peixoto, cellist Joseph Hébert, and drummer Jason Lewis join Brown and Zemelman. Two-time Grammy Award-winning violinist Mads Tolling, who’s been part of the project since the beginning, and guitar star Stanley Jordan contribute improvisational fireworks to the JazzBook ensemble as special guests.

Rounding up stellar instrumentalists for the project turned out to be far easier than finding the ideal voice. “We were on hiatus because I didn’t have a singer,” Greenberg said. He approached Linda Tillery in the extended process of looking for a vocalist, and she put him in touch with Brown, who’s been a member of her stylistically encompassing Cultural Heritage Choir for the past six years. “She has those deep gospel roots,” Greenberg says. “She’s a miracle.”

A Bay Area icon, Tillery has played a key role in both deepening and broadening the perspectives several generations of important vocalists, including Rhonda Benin, Zoe Ellis, and Valerie Troutt. Her seamless approach to African-American music emphasizes continuity between idioms, from work songs and spirituals to blues, jazz, soul, and hip-hop. Brown found new possibilities in her voice singing with the Cultural Heritage Choir. “Linda is my musical mentor,” she said. “My voice is in so many different genres, it’s hard to place me. But she’s steered other major projects my way. I love it all.”

Brown has been thriving for the past decade in that rarified space 20 feet from stardom. Stanley Jordan, a crossover jazz star since releasing a series of hit Blue Note albums that introduced his remarkably ambidextrous two-handed tapping technique in the mid-1980s, featured her background vocals on his 2008 album State of Nature (Mack Avenue), which earned a Grammy nomination. Lately she’s been working with Quincy Jones on a project revisiting the music from his influential 1970s A&M albums. Always open to new musical challenges, she didn’t know what to expect when Greenberg approached her.

“He sent some of the material and I fell in love with the music, the lyrics, the voicings. Everything resonated, and I felt I could deliver these songs with some truth and passion,” said Brown, who brought Jordan into the project. “When Stanley heard some of the material he was equally impressed and moved. It was one of those situations where I fell in love with song after song.”

The project’s moniker has led some people to think that its dedicated to obscure material from the American Songbook, but the music is inspired by the popular song tradition. When the band does tackle a piece by an outside composer, they radically reimagine it, like an arrangement of Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues” set to a slinky groove and interpolated with chord changes from Thelonious Monk’s “Evidence.”

“I don’t want to just imitate,” Zemelman says. “‘Body and Soul’ has been done over and over. If we did ‘Body and Soul’ we’d have to do it in a way that it’s not the same thing again.”

Rather than being set down in permanent ink, the JAZZBOOK material continues to evolve. And Greenberg and Zemelman are already working on new songs inspired by Brown’s bright, lustrous voice. “She’s changing the writing,” Greenberg said. “It’s a collaboration because Tammi is not just a performer. She’s a real artist who just cuts loose, even in rehearsal. A few weeks ago, she’d driven two hours from Santa Cruz. She had a gig the night before and a gig that night in Aptos. She’s exhausted, but when she starts singing the heavens open and I just sit there and marvel.”   

Andrew Gilbert (East Bay Express)