Rene Marié Experiment in Truth

BROOKLYN RIDER

In fall 2018, Brooklyn Rider released Dreamers on Sony Music Masterworks with Mexican jazz vocalist Magos Herrera. Celebrating the power of beauty as a political act, Dreamers amplifies the visionary artistry of Violeta Parra, Federico Garcia Lorca, Gilberto Gil, Joao Gilberto, Octavio Paz, and others, all who dared to dream under repressive regimes. Featuring gems from the Ibero-American songbook in evocative arrangements by Jaques Morelenbaum, Diego Schissi, Gonzalo Grau, Guillermo Klein, and Brooklyn Rider’s own Colin Jacobsen, Dreamers topped numerous charts and garnered a Grammy® nomination for Best Arrangement (Gonzalo Grau’s “Niña”). Touring widely to support the album, they appeared at venues ranging from New York City’s Jazz at Lincoln Center to Mexico City’s Art Deco masterpiece the Palacio de Bellas Artes.

Brooklyn Rider has remained steadfast in their commitment to generate new music for string quartet at nearly every phase of their history. To kick off the 2017−18 season, Brooklyn Rider released Spontaneous Symbols (In a Circle Records), featuring new commissions by Tyondai Braxton, Evan Ziporyn, Paula Matthusen, Kyle Sanna, and Colin Jacobsen. In the 2015−16 season, the group celebrated its tenth anniversary with the groundbreaking multi-disciplinary project The Brooklyn Rider Almanac, for which it recorded and toured 15 specially commissioned works by musicians from the worlds of folk, jazz, and indie rock, each inspired by a different artistic muse. The Fiction Issue, with singer-songwriter Gabriel Kahane, featured his composition which was premiered in 2012 at Carnegie Hall by Kahane, Brooklyn Rider, and Shara Nova. Additionally, Brooklyn Rider has enjoyed a long-standing relationship with the music of the iconic American composer Philip Glass, which began with 2011’s much-praised recording Brooklyn Rider Plays Philip Glass and continued with two subsequent installments of Glass’s works for string quartet, all released on the composer’s label Orange Mountain Music.

Numerous other collaborations have helped give rise to NPR Music’s observation that Brooklyn Rider is “recreating the 300-year-old form of string quartet as a vital and creative 21st-century ensemble.” During the 2016−17 season, Brooklyn Rider released an album titled So Many Things on Naïve Records with Swedish mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie von Otter, comprising music by Colin Jacobsen, Caroline Shaw, John Adams, Nico Muhly, Björk, Sting, Kate Bush, and Elvis Costello, among others. Some Of A Thousand Words, an evening-length program with choreographer Brian Brooks and former New York City Ballet prima ballerina Wendy Whelan, was an intimate series of duets and solos in which the quartet’s live onstage music is a dynamic and central creative component. Some Of A Thousand Words was featured at the 2016 Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, before two U.S. tours, including a week-long run at New York City’s Joyce Theater. A collaboration with Dance Heginbotham with music written by Colin Jacobsen resulted in Chalk And Soot, an evening-length work presented by Lincoln Center’s White Lights Festival in 2014. Brooklyn Rider has also frequently teamed up with banjoist Béla Fleck, with whom they appeared on two different albums, 2017’s Juno Concerto and 2013’s The Impostor. And in one of their longest-standing musical friendships to date, Brooklyn Rider and Iranian kamancheh player Kayhan Kalhor released the highly praised recording Silent City (World Village) in 2008, still touring the project to this day.

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NICHOLAS PHAN Described by the Boston Globe as “one of the world’s most remarkable singers,” American tenor Nicholas Phan is increasingly recognized as an artist of distinction. An artist with an incredibly diverse repertoire that spans nearly 500 years of music, he performs regularly with the world’s leading orchestras and opera companies. Phan is also an avid recitalist and a passionate advocate for art song and vocal chamber music; in 2010, Phan co-founded Collaborative Arts Institute of Chicago (CAIC), an organization devoted to promoting this underserved repertoire.

Phan launched the 2021–22 season in Chicago, curating and performing in CAIC’s tenth annual Collaborative Works Festival. This year’s festival, Strangers in a Strange Land, examines themes of immigration and migration through song. In addition to his debut with the Seattle Symphony, Phan makes returns this season to the New York Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony, Philadelphia Orchestra, and Los Angeles Master Chorale. He returns to San Francisco Performances with the string quartet Brooklyn Rider for performances of Nico Muhly’s song cycle Stranger, and he performs the world premiere of Aaron Jay Kernis’s Earth with the Seattle Chamber Music Society. He remains active at his blog, Grecchinois, where he writes on a variety of topics underlining classical music’s relevance to the world of today.

A celebrated recording artist, Phan’s most recent album, Clairières, a recording of songs by Lili and Nadia Boulanger, was nominated for the 2020 Grammy Award for Best Classical Solo Vocal Album. His album Gods and Monsters was nominated for the same award in 2017. He remains the first and only singer of Asian descent to be nominated in the history of the category, which has been awarded by the Recording Academy since 1959. His other previous solo albums Illuminations, A Painted Tale, Still Fall the Rain, and Winter Words made many “best of” lists, including those of The New York Times, The New Yorker, Chicago Tribune, and The Boston Globe. Phan’s growing discography also includes a Grammy® nominated recording of Stravinsky’s Pulcinella with Pierre Boulez and the Chicago Symphony, in addition to albums with the San Francisco Symphony, Bach Collegium Japan, Philharmonia Baroque, and Apollo’s Fire, as well as the world premiere recording Elliott Carter’s A Sunbeam’s Architecture.

Sought after as a curator and programmer, in addition to his work as artistic director of CAIC, Phan has also created programs for broadcast on WFMT and WQXR, and he has served as guest curator for projects with the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, Laguna Beach Music Festival, Apollo’s Fire, Merola Opera Program, and San Francisco Performances, where he served as the vocal artist-in-residence from 2014–2018. Praised by the Chicago Classical Review as “the kind of thoughtful, intelligent programming that should be a model,” Phan’s programs often examine themes of identity, highlight unfairly underrepresented voices from history, and strive to underline the relevance of music from all periods to the currents of the present day.

Management for Brooklyn Rider and Nicholas Phan: Opus 3 Artists, LLC. Opus3artists.com

Scottsdale Center for the Performing Arts Presents

RENÉ MARIE & EXPERIMENT IN TRUTH

Xavier Davis, piano Randy Napoleon, guitar Elias Bailey, bass Quentin E Baxter, drums

René Marie, vocals

Friday, November 19, 2021 8:00 p.m.

Scottsdale Center for the Performing Arts Virginia G. Piper Theater

RENÉ MARIE & EXPERIMENT IN TRUTH

PROGRAM René Marie describes her current concept, Pain + Wisdom = Beauty™, as an emotional equation colored and shaped by solitude and shared experience. We run from pain, but running is futile. Exploring the essence of our humanity with pain and wisdom as co-teachers, two sides of the emotional coin, beauty shines a light on the path that brought us here. Pain. Wisdom. Beauty. Three integers in a musical journey reflecting the sum of our experience.

BIOGRAPHY René Marie is a rare artist. A modern vocal icon, her unique artistry has been recognized with multiple domestic and international awards, including two Grammy® nominations for Best Jazz Vocal Album. A lyricist, composer, arranger, playwright, actress, educator, speaker, and social justice activist, René is an Americana roots artist with jazz improvisational chops. Influenced by her southern upbringing, she incorporates folk, R&B, country, and classical elements into her music and approach, lending her a unique sound and style that have captivated audiences worldwide. Over a span of two decades, 11 recordings, and countless festival and concert stage performances. René inspires people with her artistry, her life story, and her ability to affirm the power of the human spirit. Her latest Grammy®-nominated recording, Sound of Red (Motéma), celebrates her life story.

Born the fifth of seven children in Warrenton, Virginia, René absorbed a wide variety of music during her childhood—blues, folk, opera, bluegrass, and classical—and studied piano for two years. After her parents divorced, she moved with her mother to Roanoke, Virginia and began singing in R&B bands. She composed her first original song when she was 15, and by 18, she joined a strict religion that required her to stop singing. She married a former bandmate of the same faith, had two sons, and began working at a bank. At age 42, René listened to the encouragement of her older son, who knew she needed to sing again. She started singing for tips one night a week in a smoky hotel bar with the house band, and within a year, she had established her own trio, Jazz Bone. Initially supportive, her husband quickly became disenchanted with “her success” and issued an ultimatum: stop singing or leave their home. Tension over the issue escalated from emotional abuse to domestic violence. René left the house and ultimately the marriage behind. René explains, “Something happened when I started interacting creatively with musicians again. A part of my personality came back to life, a part I had surrendered. The music allowed me to act as my own advocate and defend myself. When my husband gave that ultimatum, I didn’t leave because I wanted so badly to sing. I left because the idea of being with someone who thought it was okay to dictate the terms of my life was untenable.”

Over the next 18 months, René made a flurry of monumental life changes. She moved to Richmond, Virginia; divorced her husband of 23 years; left the bank and her religion; produced her first CD, Renaissance (1999); won the title role in the Richmond world premiere production of Ella and Her Fella, Frank; and signed to the Maxjazz record label. In 2000, Maxjazz released How Can I Keep from Singing, which immediately grabbed the jazz industry’s attention. Three more acclaimed albums on the label followed: Vertigo (2001), Live at Jazz Standard (2003), and Serene Renegade (2004), along with glowing national press. In 2005, René moved to Denver and assumed creative ownership of her career, self-releasing and co-producing her sixth release, Experiment in Truth (2007). In 2008, she originated and produced “Two Skirts and A Shirt,” a show of ’70 sprotest music that toured nationally and featured jazz vocalists Carla Cook and Allan Harris. She wrote and starred as U’Dean in Slut Energy Theory, the heralded one-woman musical drama about overcoming abuse and incest, which premiered at the Cherry Lane Theater in New York City in October 2009. Its soundtrack became her seventh recording.

Always focused on healing and giving back, René launched a series of vocal therapy group sessions in 2010 that she called SLAM. “I’ve never been to college or received any professional training,” says René “So, at times, I can feel a bit anxious about my ability to convey my personal approach to singing while overseeing the business. I’ve learned that many musicians have these same struggles.However, I also know what I know, and that has come from a lot of performing experience and vulnerability on the stage. SLAM helps singers use their natural voice and personality to find their sweet spots as performers. And I do what I can to help my fellow vocalists claim their story and their power in every way.”

Voice of My Beautiful Country showcased René’s Americana core and announced her signing with the Motéma label. The stunning 2011 release spanned a century’s worth of American music, from traditional to folk to “Tin Pan Alley” songs and gave voice to patriotic songs as if composed by disenfranchised Americans. Black Lace Freudian Slip (Motéma) followed that same year and tapped into longing, independence, and prayerful introspection. She brought all her experience and interests together with her lauded 2013 release, I Wanna Be Evil: With Love to Eartha Kitt (Motéma), which was nominated for Best Jazz Vocal Album at the 57th Grammy® Awards. René highlighted Kitt’s undaunted commitment to the power of the feminine and to social justice.

Her second Grammy® nomination in the same category recognized her next Motéma release of all originals, Sound of Red (2017). Always a strong lyricist and composer, she created an 11song journey that gives insight into profound turning points of her life. Her clever songcraft and sensual vocal delivery made those personal moments not only meaningful but also enlightening to her growing audience. René expains, “I wanted to make a record that people could revisit again and again to unlock their emotions. In order to move through our days and our lives, we learn to cover things up. We don’t think we can be vulnerable to pain, loss, confusion, hurt and frustration and keep going. I wanted this record to provide a kind of architectural support for the spirit and help us feel more deeply together.”