So in Love
2010
2010 Grammy Award Nominee for Best Jazz Vocal Album.
From Roberta's liner notes.
"I am a singer, who spends much of her life in mid-air. This career- this singing life I love so much and dreamed about throughout my childhood in Italy - may seem to some as unsettled and hectic. So many of my nights are sleepless followed by those early-morning hotel "lobby calls": I'm compelled to live in the moment, en route to the next unknown.
But I do have my own special place, where I can sit back, relax, close my eyes and let my thoughts wander: it's up in mid-air.
On the plane, after the agonising ordeal of security checks that we all must endure in these trying times, and after take-off, I am suddenly suspended, drifting in a cloud-white daze. In that pleasurable state between waking and dreaming, songs visit me.
In mid-air, I will often hear whole arrangements form; the lines of lyrics disclose entirely new meanings; free associations mingle sound with everything I have lived, loved and lost.
This is usually how new tunes come into my repertoire.
Rarely do I enter a recording studio with a fully-fledged "concept." Instead, a group of songs emerges out of a synthesis between life experiences and reflection, and I end up performing the music I still truly feel in the moment. When the tape starts to roll, I find myself again in mid-air, once again traveling to half-known destinations, with sounds, faces, colors, life events (and, yes, the occasional demon) dropping in to visit. Usually, when my studio time is over, I look at the list of songs I've ended up with and see a common denominator, a unifying idea, something that was there all along, without my being conscious of it, yet something that determined my choices.
It goes without saying that the freedom to sing whatever you feel depends on having exceptionally talented and sensitive musicians by your side, and l've been fortunate to have just that in the case of this recording: a group of extraordinary artists who also happen to be great human beings and wonderful friends, ALL of them. The legendary saxophonist-flutist-master scat singing innovator, James Moody, has been my childhood idol since my jazz-loving parents, Giuseppe and Anna Maria, took me to see his group perform in Torino, Italy when I was nine years old. I owe most of what I am and do now to my parents' love and understanding of music, and to Moody's example and encouragement. He and 1 call his lovely American family!
-
James Moody : tenor Sax, voice
-
Roy Hargrove, trumpet
-
Tamir Hendelman, piano
-
Eric Gunnison, piano
-
Gerald Clayton, piano
-
Chuck Berghofer, bass
-
Neil Swainson, bass
-
Jake Hanna, drums
-
Al Foster, drums
-
Montez Coleman, drums
-
Jeff Hamilton, drums
