Just like Beautiful Nubia jazz singer Deborah J. Carter has become a constant artist on jazz-not-jazz with three albums reviewed (‘Round Midnight, Girl Talking and recently Deborah’s excellent tribute of Beatles songs Daytripper) and a previous interview featured. It’s good to see that independent artists can establish a career apart from the mainstream and major labels. And of course it’s good to see that these artists support websites like this one.
In her second jazz-not-jazz interview Deborah talks about the Beatles, their songs, her workshops and life in the Netherlands amongst other things.
Q: In the liner notes of Daytripper you are quoted with “I was never the greatest fan of the Beatles themselves but compositions of their calibre are a treasure“. Please tell me why you decided to dig out these treasures.
Deborah J. Carter: There was no ‘digging out’ of these treasures to do. These are songs that kept popping up throughout my lifetime - they still do - and I simply wanted to record them the way they were playing back to me in my head. I had never owned recordings of any of these songs, but the compositions were so familiar to me that by the time I started preparing the initial charts I already knew the chord progressions of most of them. Besides the original Beatles charts themselves I had heard several versions done by other artists of their songs. I think the most impressive of them was Sarah Vaughn’s Beatle’s tribute produced by Toto. I heard that album back in the 80’s and I think since then, I was forever destined to make a Beatle’s tribute album of my own.
Q: Please tell me why of all the songs the Beatles wrote you’ve chosen the eleven songs on the album. Is there a certain story behind the songs you’ve recorded?
Deborah J. Carter: Except for Fixing A Hole - which I first heard four years ago - these are the 11 songs that I knew best and found most interesting to ‘jazzify’ with my trio. The two songs on my album that have been in my repertoire the longest are ‘Something’ and ‘Yesterday’. In both of these songs, the things I liked best about them were the melody and the lyrics; I thought it would be nice to put more elaborate chords underneath. They say ‘less is more’, but now and then ‘more is also more’.
>>>continue