Vocalist/Composer & Group Fay Victor Ensemble to Release Jazz Disc “Absinthe & Vermouth” on Nov. 5th, 2013

We live in a wacky world where random things come and go, sometimes without rhyme or reason. We highly intelligent beings have worked hard for millennia to try and make sense of it all but still the essence of ‘it’ feels just beyond our grasp.  Absinthe & Vermouth relishes this situation as a breeding ground to observe the world as a topsy-turvy universe full of strange and beautiful stories. Pieces such as “Big Bag” reveals secrets held in plain sight, “Robot Clown” exposes the rigid smile of modern day life and “Crystal” glorifies that one moment so wonderful you never want to let it go.  Absinthe & Vermouth further highlights the sheer acumen and virtuosity of its members – vocalist Fay Victor, one of the most flexible vocalists in improvised music and jazz whose style has been described  as “artistically complete” (Ben Ratliff,  The New York Times), “…at the vanguard of jazz singers” (Robert Iannapollo, Signal to Noise), Victor’s “soulful, emotive delivery combines with avant-tinged invention, placing her alongside great vocal innovators like Betty Carter, Jeanne Lee, Sheila Jordan” (John Kelman, Allaboutjazz.com) and “one of the most extraordinary vocalists on the scene today” (Jerome Wilson, Cadence). Guitarist Anders Nilsson who “plucks spidery figures and dissonant clusters that loom like an overcast sky” (Time Out Chicago) and double bassist Ken Filiano, whom Cadence founder Robert Rusch says is “a master of technique [who] has unleashed an emotional depth in the last couple of years to make him one of creative improvising music’s most formidable bassists.”  This eight year old working unit operating with the most mundane of jazz instrumentations while turning the possibilities of that sound on its head through sonic and orchestral explorations, contrapuntal interplay, instrumental passages, wordful and wordless improvising and tight compositions all underpinning stories about the world from their unique perspective.

The Fay Victor Ensemble, with Ken Filiano (bass, effects) and Anders Nilsson (guitar, effects) was formed a couple years after Victor returned home to New York City from living in Europe in 2003. The group first performed in 2005 and shortly thereafter only performed original music composed by Victor and co-composer/husband Jochem van Dijk and the group has become one of the few vocal jazz ensembles solely dedicated to performing newly composed music. Victor and Jochem van Dijk started writing together in the late 90’s adding a few original tunes to Victor’s early recordings. One of the goals of returning to NYC was to form a group solely to present the music and words Victor and van Dijk heard in their heads. Throughout its 8-year existence and two critically acclaimed releases (Cartwheels Through The Cosmos and The FreeSong Suite), the ensemble and the writing has evolved from song based repertoire with dashes of free improvisation into a multi-textured group sound where deeply atmospheric soundscapes segue into occasionally violent free improvisational outbursts, shot through with shards of song-structures.

Band leader, vocalist and composer Fay Victor hypnotizes audiences, whether singing a blues, sculpting a free improvised piece, reinventing a Herbie Nichols tune through her own lyrics, or effortlessly improvises over the harmonies of a jazz standard and her own material.  Victor’s own material runs the full gamut of human emotion in an original mix of traditional song forms and free improvisation – or “FreeSong” which has become Victor’s trademark approach to improvised vocal music irregardless of the genre of origin.

“Awesome, incredible, unique, overwhelming—the adjectives to describe the sheer magnificence of vocalist/poet/improviser Fay Victor could go on for days,” writes the New Haven Advocate’s Bill Carbone.