Saturday, May 5, 2012

The Tierney Sutton Band

The Tierney Sutton Band consists of four talented jazz musicians who know how to accentuate the talents of each other. Tierney Sutton is the lead vocalist whose alto voice is a musical instrument along with her be-bopping fingers, hair, and voice into various jazz melodies. Christian Jacob is a phenomenal pianist, along with perceptive Ray Brinker on the drums, and the reliable Kevin Axe on the electric bass. The foursome beautifully blended together into a unified sound under the direction of the lithe Tierney Sutton.

Once in a while, you can experience that an event when time ceases to exist. For many
concert-goers, they actually attend concerts for these spiritual occasions because they love the feeling of nothing else but the music. This happened last Friday night at the Holland Center during the Tierney Sutton concert. With their pianist arranger, Christian Jacob, Tierney Sutton demonstrated why this group has been nominated five times for a Grammy Award. Beginning with a unique piano harmonization, Tierney’s voice beautifully blended with this quiet arrangement of “America, the Beautiful.” This was one of those times where music transcended into every soul in the audience. At the end of the song, you could hear the audience holding their breath and thoroughly enthralled in the beauty of these two joined in this musical event. There were seconds of silence before the audience erupted with enthusiastic applause.

The night was filled with an assortment of songs from Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess”, “Westside Story”, “I Get a Kick Out of You,” their Grammy nominated arrangement of “On Broadway”, “In Between the Devil and The Deep Blue Sea”, “My Heart Belongs to Daddy”, “Without a Song”, requests from the audience such as “Emily”, “No One Cares for Me”, and “Haunted Heart”, and an encored performance of “We Will Meet Again.”

The Tierney Sutton Band introduced me to a phenomenal jazz pianist, Christian Jacob, who arranges and records selections for his own trio. His beautiful arrangements which Tierney Sutton claims to have stolen, definitely piqued my interest into his work as well as the recordings for The Tierney Sutton Band.

This was the first time that the Tierney Sutton Band has been in this area. For a group with five Grammy nominations and having nine recordings, this is definitely a group for everyone to experience. They are the perfect examples of when four exceptional musicians blend their individual parts to create the sounds of true jazz music.

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