JazzTimes has described vocalist Katie Bull as "as a
jazz prism, refracting musical light in endlessly unpredictably ways." On
November 10, 2015, the New York-based artist presents her latest musical
adventure, All Hot Bodies Radiate (Ashokan Indie). It's her fifth album and the
latest with The Katie Bull Group Project, which features the singer alongside
some veteran kindred spirits: saxophonist Jeff Lederer, keyboardist Landon
Knoblock, bassist Joe Fonda and drummer George Schuller, all jazz improvisers with
whom she has collaborated for many years. The band has honed its adventurous
interplay over residencies in such New York hotbeds as the 55 Bar in Greenwich
Village and the Arts for Arts Evolving Music Series at Local 269 and then
Clemente Solo Velez on the Lower East Side, as well as shows at Nublu,
Greenwich House, University of the Streets, Brecht Forum, JACK, Firehouse Space
and the Whynot Jazz Room. Sheila Jordan - one of Katie's great vocal mentors,
along with Jay Clayton - described Katie's performing, poetic art as
"making the vocal jazz of the future."
On All Hot Bodies Radiate, Katie and company explore 12 of
her high-flying originals and two standards, with a hip take on "If I
Loved You" by Rodgers & Hammerstein and a wildly dramatic interpretation
of Harold Arlen's "Ding Dong, the Witch Is Dead" from The Wizard of
Oz. About the sessions, she says: "When this band works with charts in
rehearsals, we talk down the forms, exploring images or stories that inspired
the tunes. Charts are like maps - and the music is a voyage to the uncharted.
In each performance, the songs grow with a live audience, so their energy is
ultimately part of this album, too. What you hear on All Hot Bodies Radiate are
first and second takes, with the album having the synergy of a live
performance."
Katie was steeped from a young age in the vintage Manhattan
scene of downtown jazz and avant-garde dance and theater. Fittingly, the sound
and sensibility of All Hot Bodies Radiate ranges far and wide, from bop, swing
and groove to hints of experimental indie-rock - see the track "I Guess
This Isn't Kansas, Any More," with its distorted synth and pop-art sense
of melody. The album abounds in all manner of vocal virtuosity, as well as
episodes of free-jazz instrumental poetry - dig Lederer's wailing solos in
"Drive to Woodstock." Another album highlight, "Ghost
Sonata," shows off the range of Katie and her band in a single tune, from
the spectral to the swinging. About the interplay of The Katie Bull Group, the
singer says: "We have developed what I like to call 'a hive mind,' where
we start to think and react alike, spontaneously. I wrote and arranged the
songs, but we're a led-collective, so the songs are really ours, as the guys
have their own ideas for arrangements and the tunes become our collective
expression. Jeff, Landon, Joe and George have this beautiful sense of both
tradition and adventure - they can play straight-ahead or take it out."
Throughout Katie's life in downtown Manhattan and Upstate
New York, her family home was the site of bohemian gatherings of musicians,
dancers and theater artists around the dinner table, with evenings capped by
jam sessions of jazz and dance. Such cross-genre alchemy would be an enduring
influence. Among his many artistic pursuits, Katie's father - a dancer, teacher
and jazz pianist tutored by Lennie Tristano - worked with avant-vocalist
Meredith Monk; she even lived for a time with the family, so young Katie grew
up hearing performers "doing incredible things with their voices,"
she recalls. "Eventually, Lou Grassi gave me a Betty Carter tape - and
that rocked my world. I also spent my
young years going to see artists like Bill Evans and Keith Jarrett, so I
listened closely to instrumentalists - with that improvisational ideal in mind.
So, for me, singing has never been about being upfront as much as it has been
about interacting in the mix.
"Something I'm in love with is the Mingus Big Band,
where the music is rooted deep in a groove but is also flying wild and
free," Katie adds. "Nature is a big part of my consciousness -
environmental activism is part of what I do - and I experience nature as the
combination of organic order and a beautiful wildness. I wrote these new songs
at a moment of life change and evolution for me. So I hope that's what people
hear with the new album - a blend of order and wildness, along with a sense of
possibility."
When writing the songs for All Hot Bodies Radiate, Katie was
ruminating on love, nature - and the nature of love. "It was a time of
transition for me, between old love and new love," she says. "I went
to the mountains, with the hummingbirds and dragon flies around me in the
warmth of the sun. Then I sat under the glow of the moon as it filtered through
my window at the piano. Songs arrived, and through the songs, my heart began to
heal. At this time, I was also on the climate activism trail, drawn by a love
for the nature that sustains us all. I believe love radiates from all
directions."
Katie Bull was born in New York City, where she raised into
an artistic family in the West Village. As a jazz pianist, her father used to
let her tag along to jazz gigs and jam sessions, as well as run around on the
edges of the dance floors when he was teaching improvisational modern dance at
New York University. The family eventually moved to a small town Upstate, where
the jam sessions continued with the likes of percussionist Lou Grassi,
vocalist/composer Meredith Monk and others. Young dancer Bill T. Jones helped
babysit young Katie while he was a student of her father at the State
University of New York at Brockport. Some years later, she moved back to
Manhattan, settling into a raw TriBeCa loft space - formerly occupied by Don
Cherry - with her father and stepmother. Not only were free-spirited jazz
sessions a regular occurrence at the loft, the family hosted all sorts of
cross-genre artistic gatherings, as well as rehearsals for the likes of the
Living Theater.
Having been raised in a world of the performance arts, Katie
was just 15 when she got a weekly club gig singing standards. She was
introduced to jazz singer-composer Jay Clayton and singer Sheila Jordan, both
of whom took Katie under their wings. After gaining more experience in
Manhattan clubs, she attended the State University of New York at Purchase,
entering as a music major but graduating from the theater conservatory. In
recent years, Katie has focused on the hybrid-arts, or inter-arts, movement,
writing and directing many experimental productions with her company, The Bull
Family Orchestra, enabling her to integrate her background in music, dance,
writing and directing. She works as a whole-body vocal coach, along with
singing in experimental theaters and jazz venues from New York City and New
England to such international locales as Argentina, for the La Plata Jazz
festival.
Katie has collaborated with such esteemed musicians as
pianists Frank Kimbrough, Michael Jefry Stevens and Joshua Wolf; percussionists
Lou Grassi, Matt Wilson, Harvey Sorgen and George Schuller; and bassists Joe
Fonda, Martin Wind, Hill Greene, Cameron Brown and Ratzo Harris. Her
discography includes Freak Miracle (2011); The Story, So Far (2007); Love Spook
(2005); The Bull-Fonda Duo: Cup of Joe, No Bull (2005); and Conversations with
the Jokers (2002). Katie invests increasing energy to environmental activism,
initiating Climate Force and volunteering for the likes of 350.org and Food
& Water Watch. She splits her time between Manhattan and the Catskills,
near Woodstock.
