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AVAILABLE NOW: Cyrille Aimée | “Cyrille Aimée Live” | Mack Avenue Records
AVAILABLE NOW via Mack Avenue Records:
Cyrille Aimée Turns the Page with Live Finale
of Longstanding Band While Looking to
New Adventures in Music and Life
with Cyrille Aimée Live
The end of one chapter means the beginning of another. Like all the best cliffhangers, Cyrille Aimée Live leaves the audience wanting more…but also eager to discover what comes next. Recorded at a typically lively and engaging performance at New York City’s (Le) Poisson Rouge in August 2017, the album finds the acclaimed vocalist bidding a fond adieu to her long-standing band and looking forward to a brand-new phase in her life and career. The August performance marked the band’s final show together, saying goodbye to this configuration of Aimée’s band while welcoming a new chapter of creative output.
As anyone who has followed her work over the last decade can hear, Aimée thrives on living in the moment. Nowhere is that more evident than on stage; throughout Cyrille Aimée Live (available now via Mack Avenue Records) she holds the audience in the palm of her hand. Rapt during quiet moments, raucous as the spirited band swings into high gear, roaring with laughter at Aimée’s charming and quirky banter, or singing along with a Michael Jackson medley, the crowd is an essential part of the buoyant show.
The concert captured here marks the end of an era, but the tone is celebratory, not bittersweet. Aimée’s tight-knit band — guitarists Adrien Moignard and Michael Valeanu, bassist Dylan Shamat, and drummer Dani Danor — share as warm and playful an energy as ever. This group of musicians is so close that they once missed a flight as they sat at the gate, so engaged in catching up after a mere two weeks apart that all five remained completely oblivious to the boarding process and departure!
But Aimée, restlessly creative and an inveterate improviser — in her life as in her music — is anxiously looking forward to new opportunities, new sounds, and even a new home. Born in France and long based in Brooklyn, the free-spirited singer recently relocated again, this time to New Orleans, an intriguing prospect not only for her all-embracing approach to music but for its cultural resonance with her French-Dominican heritage.
“I want to find new inspirations and a new energy,” Aimée says. “I feel like you always have to search further, and that’s what I constantly try to do.”
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That questing spirit has already led Aimée on a staggering variety of adventures in her life, promising countless surprises to come. She’s ventured from singing on street corners in Europe to dazzling audiences at the world’s most prestigious jazz festivals; from sneaking out to sing in gypsy encampments in her native France to acting on Broadway; from singing Sondheim alongside Bernadette Peters to sharing her story in a TEDx talk; from braving the notoriously tough audiences at New York’s Apollo Theatre to being called a “rising star in the galaxy of jazz singers” by The New York Times. Given the myriad of directions and styles the singer has embraced, her spirit of freedom, adventure, and exploration, it’s safe to say that anyone within earshot will be thrilled to follow wherever she leads.
About Cyrille Aimée Improvisation is not just a technique for vocalist Cyrille Aimée, it’s a way of life — one that has not only allowed her to share her engaging voice and sparkling creativity with the world, but has led her on an unexpected journey. Growing up in the town of Samois-sur-Seine in France, Aimée would sneak out of her bedroom window to join the gypsy caravans gathered for the annual Django Reinhardt Festival. Those experiences exposed Aimée not just to the joys of gypsy jazz but to the gypsies’ spontaneous, nomadic, music-filled way of life, imbuing a spirit that has earned her accolades from the Montreux Jazz Festival Vocal Competition and the Sarah Vaughn International Jazz Vocal Competition. In 2014 Aimée made her major label debut with It’s A Good Day (Mack Avenue), featuring an innovative two-guitar band that returned for 2016’s highly acclaimed Let’s Get Lost. She shares her story with audiences and students alike, having been invited to present a TEDx talk and to address the Conference on World Affairs, and teaching master classes for aspiring musicians.
Cyrille Aimée · Cyrille Aimée Live Mack Avenue Records · Release Date: June 22, 2018 |