Word: peyroux
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...song for me right now." The scene was a sidewalk in Paris in 1990. The challenge was issued by the leader of a ragtag touring group called the Lost Wandering Blues & Jazz Band, who was holding an impromptu audition. The wannabe was an American-born teenager named Madeleine Peyroux, who had been busking around Paris. She crooned Jeepers Creepers, snapping her fingers as accompaniment...
...long way from street singing to stardom, and the intervening 15 years have been riddled with delays and detours, but Peyroux, 31, has made it. With two successful CDs behind her--the more recent of which, last year's Careless Love (Rounder), continues to sell nicely--she ranks as one of the bright talents of the jazz world. Instead of on sidewalks, she performs in festivals, auditoriums and clubs, backed by a polished combo. She still snaps her fingers (when she isn't strumming her guitar), but now plenty of listeners are snapping and tapping along with...
...Peyroux's throaty alto carries uncanny echoes of Billie Holiday. She has the same knack of languorously lagging behind the beat, bending her notes into microtones of aching and yearning. But the style, the subtle phrasing, seems natural to Peyroux--lived, not learned. Besides, it isn't Holiday's stylistic flourishes that interest her primarily. Holiday exemplified a line of female blues and jazz singers who "presented the women's side of things, the underdog point of view," says Peyroux. "It was a new form of women's self-expression...
...Peyroux's singing, what's old is new again. Born in Athens, Ga., she has a gut feeling for "the good old reminiscence of Southern music"--country and bluegrass, the blues, early jazz. In her albums and live shows, she includes tunes once owned by figures like Bessie Smith, Hank Williams and of course Holiday. At the same time, she features the work of such contemporaries as Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, not to mention her originals. What is the common element in all these songs, other than the musical alchemy by which she makes them her own? "I could...
Come sit in the audience of NPR’s weekly radio program, etown, as they host a live taping. Hosted by Nick and Helen Forster, etown will feature the Cowboy Junkies and Madeleine Peyroux in this mix of musical performance and interview. Tickets $22, 26. Harvard Box Office (617) 496-2222. 8 p.m. Sanders Theater...