Kellye Gray - Rendering (2017)

Jazz vocalist KELLYE GRAY has had a long and rewarding career. A singer with a powerful voice and a nearly four-octave range, she’s toured extensively across the country and around the world, sharing the stage with some of the top names in music. She’s also recorded over seven albums as a leader. Her first recording, Standards in Gray, was released 25 years ago. It received rave reviews and extensive airplay, and it launched a career that remains unabated today.

The album had been out of print for nearly 23 years when the record label that owned the rights gave her ownership of the master. The album had played a seminal role in Gray’s career, and getting ownership of it after so many years made her take stock of her artistic life. That led her to re-record many of the same songs that appeared on that first release. She calls the new album RENDERING, which the dictionary defines as “a depiction or interpretation; work of art or performance that portrays something,” and, indeed, RENDERING is a work of art that portrays Grays’ growth as an artist. She chose to re-release Standards in Gray and package the two CDs together as a kind of snapshot of then and now.

Standards in Gray was recorded over three days at Sugar Hill Studios in Houston, Texas, one of the oldest studios in the country and the purveyor of numerous gold records. It was recorded live to two-track analog tape, in the days before Sibelius and ProTools, giving the album a warm, rich sound, even after transferring it to CD format. For RENDERING, Gray took a very different approach.

Gray, a Texas native who has been living in San Francisco for many years, wanted to go back to her musical family to make this CD. She invited 30 old friends and supporters, including several who participated in her crowdfunding campaign, to join her at Wire Road Studios to record a live performance. She would have liked to bring back all the original musicians, but schedules and other circumstances did not make that possible. She was, however, able to enlist drummer Sebastian Whittaker, who passed away shortly after the concert at a young age, and saxophonist Warren Sneed, a mainstay on the Houston jazz scene, to join her again in the studio. RENDERING also features Pamela York on piano, David Craig on bass, and Andre Hayward on trombone, all Texas-based touring musicians with solid followings.