NERISSA CAMPBELL QUINTET(US)

Mon 2 Feb 2009 @ 8:00pm

Admission Members $15 PJS Student Members $8 Concessions $18 Guests $22

Nerissa Campbell is a young singer who is indicative of our time, a time when categories are ignored and walls between types of music have been torn down.

How would you categorize a singer whose songs include elements of pop, jazz, rhumba and blues dipped in a smoky beer batter of late night living?

First and foremost, one would have to consider Ms. Campbell a song writer. There is a sincere, raw and open emotional quality to her songs. “In my song writing I like to conjure up more imagery than tell a specific story,” she says.

Secondly, she is a true singer. Her voice shifts in mood and expressiveness depending on the song, becoming rough and syrupy like Grace Slick by way of Billie Holiday, plaintive like Cat Power, or smooth and sexy like Cassandra Wilson.

Nerissa Campbell has developed a unique and deeply personal writing and performing voice and ponders a new approach to her music in her latest CD release, Musings Of A Telescopic Tree. Its roots in jazz, it explores somber pop-ballads, bluesy folk songs, atmospheric instrumentals and a lyricism full of thought and space.

Musings of a Telescopic Tree is an album of moodiness and of melancholy; of stories of desire and the sorrows of losing loved things, the weight of depression and the lightness of being.

Touring in February across her native Australia to support the album release, Nerissa Campbell will be performing in her home-town of Perth for one-show-only at the Perth Jazz Society.

“…lyrical imagery is paired with simple music consisting of sparse drums, a classic blues bass riff, and smatterings of guitar and piano. Ms. Campbell delivers the song with the laid back assurance and attitude of a young Peggy Lee…”  Mark Kirby

www.nerissacampbell.com