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Rita
Chiarelli
Rita Chiarelli collaborated with the Thunder Bay Symphony Orchestra to produce her new CD, a thrilling album on which Chiarelli sounds great. It will be released at the end of March.
"As an artist I want to stretch. If you compare
it to a painter, you can't always use the same colour," says Rita Chiarelli,
about her upcoming CD, Uptown Goes
Downtown: Rita Chiarelli with the Thunder Bay Symphony Orchestra.
Chiarelli has been pushing her musical boundaries recently, painting with a
wide-ranging musical palette. Her audience knew her mainly as a blues and R&B
singer-songwriter until 2007, though jazz, Cajun and country influences could be
heard on her recordings. When Chiarelli released a CD of Italian folk songs,
Cuore: The Italian Sessions,
she knew she was taking a risk. However, the CD was well received, and for it,
Chiarelli won in the best world solo artist category at the 2007 Canadian Folk
Music Awards. "It was very nice to get a pat on the back for going out on a
limb," she says. Chiarelli's manager, Liz Harvey-Foulds, came up with the idea
to have Chiarelli record with the Thunder Bay Symphony Orchestra (TBSO). Harvey-Foulds,
who lives in the Thunder Bay area, approached the orchestra, and as a result,
two years ago, Chiarelli and the TBSO did a concert in a cabaret setting. "It
was a huge success," Chiarelli recalls. "People walked out of there saying, 'We
wish we could hear that again,' and that got the wheels turning." The
collaboration culminated with Chiarelli's recording of Uptown Goes Downtown with
the TBSO at the Thunder Bay Community Auditorium in mid-November 2007. They
recorded for two days without an audience, and
on
the third evening a performance that was recorded took place. Also on the
recording are Chiarelli's longtime guitarist, "Papa" John King, and bassist Joe
Phillips, who wrote the charts for the CD. A reviewer from Thunder
Bay's Chronicle Journal, Steven Baric, writes that
"it's too easy to create horrible Montavanni-style elevator score
arrangements for blues changes, but Joe Phillips'
backup scores for the Chiarelli charts were
brilliantly inventive and original."
Rita Chiarelli (left) and conductor Jason Caslor at a rehearsal for the concert (soon to be a CD) Uptown Goes Downtown. The CD will be available at the end of March.
Uptown Goes Downtown, Chiarelli's seventh CD, has 11 tracks; three of them are covers and eight are her original tunes, new and old, and from Cuore. A thrilling album on which Chiarelli sounds great, it opens and closes with a live version of a new Chiarelli tune, a ballad called "You Don't Say"; and includes the audience favourite "I Can Change for You; "Serves You Right," from her re-released Road Rockets album and "The Thrill Is Gone," popularized by B.B. King. The Italian tunes are perfect with the symphony, as she says.
The
main difference between working with a symphony orchestra and a blues band is
that an orchestra never improvises, while improvising is an essential aspect of
playing blues music, Chiarelli says. If she doesn't come in after an eight-bar
intro from her blues band, the musicians keep on playing; if she's supposed to
come in after a four-bar intro from the orchestra, she has to start singing.
"You have to know the arrangements [for an orchestra] very well," Chiarelli
says. "The pressure is on to perform. It sharpens you as an artist – to come out
of your safety zone and work with a whole different group of musicians, to test
yourself and push your boundaries." Her personal connection to classical music
is through her late vocal coach, Edward Johnson. "He taught me how to sing what
I love to sing with classical techniques," says Chiarelli, whose voice has a
three-octave range (the most incredible singers in the world generally have
between a two- and three-octave range, says Yahoo Answers). "That's why my
voice, after years of singing, is still in great form. I always appreciated
classical singing because of his training." He helped her "sing like Big Mama
Thornton," while at the same time, keep her voice, she adds.
To be released at the end of March, Uptown Goes Downtown, on Chiarelli's Mad Iris label, will be distributed across Canada by Festival Distribution, and at writing, Chiarelli was an "inch away" from signing with a U.S. distributor. On its release, all or parts of it can be downloaded from her website, www.ritachiarelli.com, or a CD can be ordered by mail.
- Ruth Schweitzer
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