Likes & Influences: Louis Armstrong, Billie, Ella, Sarah, Carmen McRae, Dinah Washington, Benny Carter, Bird, Diz, Duke, Count Basie, James Moody, Slide Hampton, JJ Johnson, Bud Powell, Frank Wess, Hank Jones, Eddie Jefferson, Jon Hendricks, Bill Evans, Shirley Horn, Maria Callas, Elis Regina, Bill Evans, John Coltrane, Horace Silver, Joao Gilberto, Jimmy Heath, Billy Higgins
"Gambarini is a true successor to Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, and Carmen McRae." - Kevin Lowenthal, BOSTON GLOBE
Roberta Gambarini was born in Torino, Italy, into a family where jazz was much loved and appreciated. She began listening to this music as a child and started taking clarinet lessons when she was twelve years old. By the time she was 17, she began singing and performing in jazz clubs around Northern Italy and at the age of 18, she decided to move to Milan to pursue a career as a jazz singer.
Soon after her move to Milan, Roberta took third place in a national jazz radio competition on TV, leading to performance opportunities at jazz festivals throughout Italy. She performed on Jazz broadcasts on Italian radio and TV channels and in 1986 began recording both under her own name and as a guest. In 1997, she worked with French Hammond organ player Emmanuel Bex, touring jazz clubs throughout Italy.
In 1998 she moved to the United States with a scholarship from the New England Conservatory in Boston. Two weeks later, Roberta stunned many in the jazz world with a third place finish in the Thelonious Monk International Jazz Vocal Competition.
A dynamic performer with virtuosic vocal chops, she draws rave reviews and enthusiastic fan support wherever she performs. And until her North American debut, Easy to Love (Groovin’ High/Kindred Rhythm), was released on June 6, 2006, she had done so with just word of mouth alone.
On Easy to Love, Roberta showed off her instrumental approach and warm timbre, impeccable timing and intonation, incredible technique and scatting and improvisation skills on a set of 12 excellent jazz standards and classic songs from The Great American Songbook. The album also included two bonus tracks and featured special guest James Moody on a scintillating scat duel.
Easy to Love was nominated for a GRAMMY® in 2007 in the Best Jazz Vocal Album category (along with albums by Karrin Allyson, Nancy King, Diana Krall, and Nancy Wilson). Roberta’s “formidable talent” (DownBeat Magazine) has also garnered her wins as the 2007 Female Jazz Singer of the Year from the Jazz Journalists Association (JJA) and as the 2007 Talent Deserving Wider Recognition from DownBeat Magazine’s Annual Critics Poll.
On February 12, 2008, Roberta made her major label debut with You Are There (Groovin’ High/Emarcy), a collection of 14 hauntingly beautiful melodies, with the legendary pianist, Hank Jones. The music was recorded in one afternoon; Roberta and Hank had no concept for the album- just 25 tunes they liked and thought would be interesting to record. “There were no isolation booths, no headphones, no over dubs,” Gambarini remembers. “The sound would be just what you would hear had you been in someone’s living room playing among friends.” That is the magic of Hank Jones.
Roberta Gambarini has performed with Michael Brecker, Ron Carter, Herbie Hancock, Slide Hampton, Roy Hargrove, Jimmy Heath, James Moody, Hank Jones, Christian McBride, and Toots Thielemans, among many others, and has performed at Carnegie Hall, Kennedy Center, Lincoln Center, Town Hall and Walt Disney Concert Hall, and jazz festivals around the world such as Barbados, London, Monterey, North Sea, Toronto, and Umbria.
Roberta was recently voted Rising Star Female Vocalist of the Year in 2008 DownBeat Critics Poll. Roberta will tour internationally with her band in support of her new album, So In Love, which is scheduled for a Summer 2009 release.
"Amazing stuff...all of it." - Don Heckman, LA TIMES
"Gambarini is the real deal. - Steve Eddy, OC REGISTER
"Number 1 Vocal Jazz Record of 2005 - SWING JOURNAL (Japan)
Firmly planted she may be already, but Roberta Gambarini lays waste more popular female jazz vocalists like the oddly iconic Diana Krall, who doesn't possess even half of the Italian singer's range, interpretive skills or onstage personality. With a crack trio featuring Cyrus Chestnut, bassist Neil Swainson and legendary drummer Jimmy Cobb (the last surviving player on Miles Davis' Kind of Blue (Columbia, 1959), and who'll be performing music from that album with his own group, Jimmy Cobb's So What Band, the following night), Gambarini delivered a 90- minute set that had the audience so rapt that, during its quietest moments—and there were some incredibly quiet moments for an outdoor performance in the heart of downtown Ottawa—you literally could hear a pin drop.
Unassuming and with an unforced stage presence that connected with the audience immediately, Gambarini and her trio worked their way through a range of standards, focusing heavily on music from her upcoming release, So In Love (Emarcy, 2009), ranging from the warmly balladic medley of a slightly reworded "Porgy, I's Your Woman Now" and "I Loves You Porgy," from George and Ira Gershwin's enduring opera Porgy and Bess, to a buoyant uptake of "On the Sunny Side of the Street," with a vocal solo modeled after the three instrumental ones on the 1957 Verve album by Dizzy Gillespie, Sonny Stitt and Sonny Rollins, Sonny Side Up. Gambarini may be relatively young, but she knows a vast history and repertory of song, culling film music from Ennio Morricone's 1989 soundtrack to Cinema Paradiso, as well as Dave Brubeck's classic "In Your Own Sweet Way" and Billy Strayhorn's often-covered "Lush Life."
TD Canada Trust Ottawa International Jazz Festival / Roberta GambariniGambarini has chops, but she knows when and how to use them. Scatting with fluidit
Not many vocalists can deliver accompanied only by a piano. Not only do you deliver but the degree of difficulty of a song like "Too Late Now" only serves to showcase what a suburb gift you have. Roberta, you are truly an amazing talent!
You have surely heard about the tragic death of Neda - a brave young woman who was murdered in Iran just for peacefully protesting with her father on the streets of Teheran.
I'm going to give the final words to Roberta Gambarini, with whom I spoke last week, given that she helps open the Ottawa International Jazz Festival with her 9 p.m. concert this Thursday in Confederation Park. She may never collaborate with The Bad Plus, but in fact, I don't they're that far apart when they talk about jazz, accessibility, popularity and all that.
"I wish it (jazz) was more widespread as a genre in the mass culture, but maybe it’s not meant to be. I don’t know. Or maybe it is. I don’t know," said Gambarini, shown right with James Moody.
I believe it’s about exposure. I know from my personal experience. You just play this music. it has to be exposed on a very high level and on a level of integrity and honesty. Once you do that, even people who don’t have a background of avid listening... they always latch on to it.
"I believe really that all this music neds in its purest form needs would be some exposure to be given some exposure to be more on TV... and also exposure to people when they’re very young."
I did broach the topic of different kinds of jazz with Gambarini, intending to suggest that all those pigeonholes do complicate matters. Her reply: "The different labelings of this type of jazz or that type of jazz those are mostly marketing concepts... they didn’t come up from the musicians, from the people who make this music... those are made by the industry."
Gambarini said that she's converting people to jazz, one or two at a time, when she plays the Blue Note in New York, which ranks among the city's bigger jazz-related tourist attractions. "You have a lot of tourists to have the full new york experience., not necessarily because they know the performers," Gambarini says. "Every night there’s always one or two people who come up and say thank you this is our first jazz concert and we didn’t know it would be this fun."
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