Arts ENCORE
‘Beauty Indestructible’
Kalamazoo singer-songwriter is making moves with new record by
Jef Otte
Bette Lynn Photography
I
Singer-songwriter Ashley Daneman releases her new record Beauty Indestructible this month.
32 | Encore JANUARY 2015
f you’re going to be an artist, Kalamazoo’s a good town for it, says singer-songwriter Ashley Daneman, despite the fact that she’s moved to New York City. Daneman and her husband, Benje, a jazz musician, moved there from Kalamazoo in October. “In Kalamazoo,” she concedes, “we were musicians full time. We could cover expenses. It was no big deal. It’s a really easy place to live, compared to New York, and I think Kalamazoo has a lot going on in arts and music for a city its size. Good Midwestern folks, how I grew up.” How she grew up was in Toledo, Ohio, the daughter of musical parents who taught her an appreciation for the jazz greats: Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole. She played piano and performed in musicals. “I learned how to sing classically,” she says, “but I started college in the opera department at the University of Cincinnati and felt like I was in some sort of vise. I wasn’t able to express myself through singing other people’s songs and singing very straight.” That impulse toward self-expression led her to a reinvention from opera singer to jazz singer — what she calls “a platform to be selfexpressive on another level” — and from there to the bright lights, big city, where she attended the Manhattan School of Music and earned a master’s degree in jazz vocal performance. Daneman’s education and her passion for jazz certainly come through on Beauty Indestructible, her new record due out Jan. 20, which she describes as a “whole concept that has to do with my own life and hardships and how I emerged from them.” Tracks like “Here Comes a Body” list at a rhythmic simmer, meditative, before transcending into a nearly avant-garde exuberance. Elsewhere, a more restrained influence feels fully present, as in the dynamic shifts of “He Loves Me Well” or “How You Got to Yes,” a study in Steely Dan’s brand of deliberate jive. But while Daneman’s tunes acknowledge a heavy debt to jazz, she doesn’t identify herself as a jazz musician. Her true calling — the one