PHOTO: MARY ELLEN-MARK
Not many musicians go from street busking to the top of the charts and then back to the streets. But Madeline Peyroux is not your typical musician.The jazz/blues vocal stylist whose rich, smoky voice has been compared to everyone from Billie Holiday and Bessie Smith to Norah Jones and Cassandra Wilson, has experienced a journey with as many twists and turns as her snaky music. And it’s far from its destination.
“At the end of the day, I just want to make sure that I’m singing, so I don’t have very much else to say,” said Peyroux last week from her New York City home. The 39- year-old native of Athens, Georgia then immediately stood the sentence on its head by offering a detailed chronicle of her acclaimed career that began on a Paris street corner, grew in 1996 when TIME magazine pronounced her 1996 debut album Dreamland “the most exciting, involving vocal performance by a new singer this year,” and has continued with a steady stream of acclaimed albums and performances that have secured her place as one of the pop music scene’s most accomplished artists.
Following her “hippie” parents from Georgia to New York so her father could pursue an acting career, Peyroux found herself at age 13 in Paris with her newly divorced mother.
“My parents were definitely radical in their own right, and while I didn’t enjoy it too much at the time, my rather eccentric upbringing did expose me to a lot of things that I’m now glad I was exposed to – it was a big part of my education,” said Peyroux.
Having learned the rudiments of guitar by playing the ukulele with her mother, Peyroux became attracted to the street musicians in the Latin Quarter of Paris, and by the time she was 15, she was performing on her own and with a group called the Riverboat Shufflers. The next year, she joined The Lost Wandering Blues and Jazz Band and spent a number of years touring Europe performing jazz standards.
“There was this special chemistry at that time in Paris where musicians were sort of sharing this free space and the air was very liberal,” she said. “Everyone was just exploring how to enjoy life and share ideas with people. For me as a 15-year-old, it was very impressionable and I was excited about seeing people function as musicians.”
“The scene was joyful and supported by the community, but it was temporary – it ended a couple years after I landed there. In order to be satisfying, music needs to be spontaneous and organic, but perhaps things that are truly beautiful, honest and organic can’t be forced to continue artificially along a certain path.”
The time honing her trade on the street taught Peyroux plenty, more about attitude and life experiences than technical musical theory, although she was exposed to the music of Smith and Holiday by visiting American musicians. It also taught her about performing in front of virtually any type of audience.
Read more on: http://www.jpost.com/ArtsAndCulture/Music/Article.aspx?id=289153
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