Rolly Brown - Songbirds (2019)

Rolly Brown, joined here by several wonderful female jazz vocalists, is a versatile acoustic guitarist conversant in many American musical styles, Nat'l Fingerpicking Champion and acclaimed teacher and performer.

It has been a dream of mine, for over a decade, to get a bunch of wonderful women singers and do a CD in which, drawing from the inspiration of the Joe Pass/Ella Fitzgerald duet albums of jazz standards, I played the “Joe Pass” role and they played the “Ella Fitzgerald” role. After the dreaming stage, the planning stage, and the pre-production stage, the first sessions took place in 2014. The singers included here (Wendi Bourne, Susie Burke, Cathy Fink, Abbie Gardner, Buffie Groves, Terry Leonino, Marcy Marxer, and Annie Patterson,) are all stellar artists, and I’m proud and pleased to share the stage with each of them. Suffice it to say that most of them have been dear friends for decades, and I value them as wonderful human beings as well as fine musicians. Some of the recordings are from concert performances while others were done in the studio. With a couple exceptions, we went for a “live” feel, recording until we got a take we each loved, rather than cutting and pasting in a quest for perfection.
I asked each singer to choose what they wanted to perform, with the rough idea of the theme being “Torch Songs”.
I hope the result pleases the listener as much as it pleases me.