Sinne Eeg - Dreams 

Stunt / Vertrieb: New Arts International 

Veröffentlichung: 3. November 2017

SINNE EEG is a singer’s singer. With her perfect intonation, impeccable sense of time, and mellifluous timbre, the Danish vocalist has earned the admiration of fans and fellow musicians around the world. An international star in Europe and Asia, Eeg is poised to break out in the U.S. with her newest CD, DREAMS.

Eeg is no stranger to this country. She’s been coming here for years,doing the hard work of touring coast to coast in clubs large and small.Although she often travels with stellar pianist and countryman JACOB CHRISTOFFERSEN, her first U.S. fans were the musicians she met and performed with along the way. She’s also gathered a considerable coterie of jazz vocal aficionados who have sustained her musical peregrinationsaround the country.

Although jazz has become popular around the world and local jazz scenes have cropped up in far flung corner s of the planet, America is still admired as the homeland of the genre, and many think that the distinctly American inflection of the music is best expressed by American musicians. That’s why Eeg chose to record DREAMS with a mostly American band in Brooklyn, New York. It’s also her first CD released on an American label, ArtistShare, which is home to jazz luminaries including

Maria Schneider, Billy Childs, and Jim Hall.

DREAMS is Eeg’s ninth CD as a leader. Her last CD, the critically acclaimed and award-winning Eeg-Fonnesbæk, a duo project featuring only vocals and bass, was her first album distributed in the U.S. On DREAMS, she’s once again joined by her longtime collaboratorChristoffersen, with the rest of the ensemble comprising some of the most respected names on the U.S. jazz scene today. Eeg first met drummer JOEY BARON, who has played with a Who’s Who of jazz greats,

when he gave a master class at The Danish National Academy of Music in 2002. LARRY KOONSE is a widely respected L.A.-based guitarist whom Eeg met on a gig in Japan around five years ago. The two became friends and musical compatriots, and Eeg has since performed with him numerous times in Europe and Asia, as well as around the States. Eeg was thrilled to have SCOTT COLLEY in the band. She has been a fan of the bassist for many years. Not only has he been a sideman with many well-known headliners, he’s also childhood friends with Koonse. According to Eeg, “It’s important to perform with great musicians, but it’s also important to perform with people you genuinely like. I find it essential to have a good rapport with the band, as I do with the guys on this CD. Musicians can have a lot of ego, which can make the music suffer, but when you genuinely like each other, it’s easier to listen to one another as co-equals. You can drop your ego, immerse yourself in the song, and allow the music to speak through you. It’s almost like meditating.”

Eeg is firmly rooted in the traditions of the great jazz vocalists, but approaches songs from the Great American Songbook with a more modern sensibility. She’s been a longtime fan of Sheila Jordan, whose version of “Falling in Love With Love” motivated Eeg to record her own inimitable take on the song. And she’s always admired Sarah Vaughan’s rendition of “What Is This Thing Called Love.” Eeg and Christoffersen wrote an arrangement for the tune, but when they were in the recording studio, the band decided to just wing it and improvised the arrangement on the spot, breathing fresh life into the standard. Eeg doesn’t often dabble in political or social commentary in her music, but she added

some new lyrics to “Anything Goes” that make the tune almost painfully contemporary.

Indeed, Eeg is also a formidable songwriter, and six of the tunes on this disc are her own compositions. Her writing encompasses a variety of styles, from romantic ballads as in “Love Song,” a tune she wrote for her new husband just a day before she and the band went into the studio, to groove-based funky tunes like “The Bitter End.” Eeg also has an affinity for waltzes and wrote the music for “Head Over Heels.” For this tune, she asked Mads Mathias, the Danish vocalist, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist, to write the lyrics. Eeg recorded “Time to Go” as a duo with just vocal and piano on a previous CD, but wanted to give it a broader treatment on this project. The song reflects her sadness when she realized that her long distance relationship with a man based in Shanghai, where she frequently performed, could never work out.

Eeg is a true jazz musician at heart, and she’s not content to just rehash old approaches to style and technique. Although she’s a consummate storyteller, she wanted to push herself in a new direction and wrote “Dreams,” a lovely, wordless ballad that casts the singer as another instrument in the band. “Aleppo” is perhaps her biggest departure as a lyricist. She wrote the song after seeing a documentary about the suffering of children in Aleppo, Syria, which has been at the heart of the civil war there. Eeg relates, “It broke my heart seeing these children who are so traumatized by war that they can’t even cry anymore. I just needed to express my feelings about it. I haven’t written about political or social issues before, but with everything happening in the world these days, I think I’m going to be writing more and more about these topics.”