tESSA SOUTER’S NEW ALBUM, SHADOWS AND SILENCE: THE ERIK SATIE PROJECT, coming june 27 2025
“A century-spanning collaboration which arrives with the immediacy of lightning.” Neil Tesser, GRAMMY Award–winning journalist, radio host, music critic (liner notes)
Taking the French composer’s music as its beating heart, its arteries branching into other vital inspirations,
Shadows and Silence: The Erik Satie Project, pairs chamber jazz interpretations of Erik Satie’s most famous melodies with Anglo-Trinidadian, jazz singer/songwriter Tessa Souter’s evocative lyrics. Two complementary pieces from Miles Davis’s seminal
ESP album and two classic French chansons, ‘Avec le Temps’ and ‘If you Go Away/Ne Me Quitte Pas’, round out the album which highlights Satie’s continuing influence on 20-century music exactly 100 years after his death.
PRESS: DL MEDIA, INC.
Roberta Lawrence 917-929-4910 EMAIL roberta@dlmedia.com
RADIO: GROOV MARKETING
Mark Rini 360-666-3046 EMAIL mark@groovmarketing.com
NEIL TESSER’S LINERS CLICK HERE
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TESSA’S NOTES ON TRACKS CLICK HERE
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“Her gifts in communicating music directly from and to the heart is truly special.” Raul Da Gama, Jazz Journalist
“I thought it was a great idea of hers to do the music of Satie. I’ve heard the odd Satie piece in a jazz context, but this is the first time I’ve heard a whole album, and with lyrics. It suits her vibe. Tessa’s singing is elegant and very beautiful and it’s for real – the way
she is. It makes you feel something and that’s what you want,” says Drummond. Yasushi Nakamura has been playing with Tessa for over ten years. “Tessa is definitely one of the great singers of New York with a very unique and beautiful voice,” he says. “And I feel very special, because one of the songs, Gymnopedie Number 1 (‘Rayga’s Song’) she wrote the lyrics for my son. I can’t wait for people to hear it.” Over the course of six months, Tessa would bring pieces she’d written lyrics for to Perdomo and they’d bat around ideas. “It was really interesting for me,” says Perdomo. “One of my teachers, the late Sir Roland Hanna, had played some of this music with his trio in a jazz context, but here we’re taking it to a different level. And then you bring all the sophistication of Tessa and her
lyrics. They give you a different point of view as to where the music should be.”
“An artist with the talent and the imagination to match her compelling musical visions” Don Heckman
Perdomo gifted Souter with two radical new arrangements of Gnossienne No. 1 (‘A Song For You’) and Gnossienne No. 3 (‘Holding on to Beauty’). “I was really struck by how redolent of the lyrics they were. I think you would know what the songs are about even if you didn’t speak a word of English. But you might be forgiven for not realizing they are Satie,” she says. “I listened to a lot of jazz interpretations of Satie while I was researching for this album. But none that took Satie out to the extent that Luis did with his arrangements, or that Billy did with Gymnopedie No. 3 (‘D’ou Venons Nous’). Everyone is so completely in the moment in the true spirit of jazz and they are all such incredible musicians, I trust them completely to go anywhere they want to. And they trust me to follow along. I laugh when I tell people what the album is and they say they love Satie, because this is Satie turned on its head.”
