Jazz Monthly.com Interview with Eliane Elias

“Jazz Monthly Feature Interview” Eliane Elias

Smitty: I’m so overjoyed to welcome for the first time to JazzMonthly.com a wonderful singer, songwriter, composer, arranger; she has such a strong yet emotional voice; she has a great repertoire of music; you perhaps remember her from great projects such as Amanda, So Far So Close, The Three Americas, Illusions, and now she has released a wonderful new record, it’s called Around the City, please welcome the fantastic Ms. Eliane Elias. Eliane, how are you?

Eliane Elias (EE): Fine, how are you?

Smitty: Great. I was listening to your new record as soon as I received it and just fell in love with it. Oh, it’s got such a great vibe and you just mixed it up so well with the piano, the B3 organ, the Fender Rhodes…I mean, you just had such a great time with this record.

EE: Oh, thank you. I’m glad you are enjoying it. I really enjoyed the whole process of making it and I’m now enjoying playing it live, so it’s fun.

Smitty: Yes, it is. So, now, just to back up just a little, I read somewhere that you were teaching music at 15 years old?

EE: That’s right. I was a child prodigy, as they would call it. I started taking piano at age seven and by age 11 I was playing all kinds of different jazz standards, Brazilian standards, and I was transcribing music from other great pianists, playing along with those records, so when I was 13 I was admitted to one of Brazil’s best School of Music we have there, and I graduated in two years. So that same year I was invited to teach in the school, so I started teaching at age 15, when I was teaching master class in jazz improvisation, piano, theory, all of those things, and then a couple years after that I started working with Toquinho and Antonio Carlos Jobim and Vinicius de Moraes, one of the greats of the Bossa Nova Brazilian music. So my career started very early.

Smitty: Yes. That’s amazing because at 15 years old, most at that age don’t even want to take music lessons, and here you are at age 15 teaching music.

EE: I was teaching them too, both professionals and those, and all that. Yes, I was teaching. It’s pretty amazing when I look back and enough time has gone by and I say, wow, that’s different.

Smitty: Yes. So how did music become such a love for you?

EE: Well, I come from a very musical family. My mother’s side of the family…she played classical piano, has an incredible collection of jazz records in the house; my grandmother played acoustic guitar, was a great composer; and my great grandparents were Italian opera singers, so the music comes from the family and I fell in love with the piano. I started just taking piano like most children just start taking piano, but I fell in love with the music really deeply and I had a great facility to the music, so that, of course, was fantastic because everything I touched did well and it went well, and then I learned quickly and it was fun, it was great for me, and it was a great passion and still is.

Smitty: Yes. Now, did you have other friends that were taking music lessons as well and had such a love for music or were you just alone in this journey?

EE: At that age I was kind of alone in this thing because, I mean, I have a sister who is older than me a couple of years and she started taking piano two years before me, and she had an average talent….I mean, was not somebody who did not have talent, but was nice and average….but I started and in two months I did everything that a child normally would do in two years. So it was so fast that I would just go through the program like crazy because of my facility, so it became very apparent to teachers and to me because the way I was treated, because I would play, the teacher would cry, the teacher would call another teacher to hear, you know, it was all this talk about Eliane on TV and on the radio and on and everything, so it was kind of something that became so clear to me that I wanted to do, that I was doing well, and that I wanted to have as my profession with music.

Smitty: When did you start to professionally play music?

EE: Besides teaching, when I was 15. I started playing then with my trio, playing in different clubs in Sao Paulo, where I’m from, Brazil, big city, and also right after that, by playing in different clubs. I was invited to play with some of the great composers of Brazil like Antonio Jobim and others and his partner and lyricist, Vinicius de Moraes, so I started at age 15 basically. And I was traveling all over the world. So at age 17 I was traveling all over South America, actually. We were doing extensive touring with the group that I mentioned, with Vinicius de Moraes, Toquinho, and I already had my eyes on this country. I wanted to come here. I knew that this is what I wanted to do at that point.

Smitty: I look back to records like Amanda and you were working with Michael Brecker…

EE: With Randy Brecker, Michael Brecker, yeah.

Smitty: Yes, and that had to be such a treat to work with those two greats in the music business.

EE: Yeah, it was great. I mean, I was working….even before then I was working with Steps Ahead, Michael Brecker too, so, sure, it was fantastic. Amanda was my very first record, named after my daughter with Randy Brecker.

Smitty: Yeah. That had to be such a joy.

EE: Yeah, that was a fantastic time.

Smitty: Yes. I know that you hardly ever do a record without Oscar Castro-Neves. He is just one of my all-time favorites. I love to hear him play, love to watch him play, because you can tell that he totally enjoys playing the guitar.

EE: Yes.

Smitty: And he just has so much emotion when he’s playing. Talk about being in the studio with him and what that’s like, that whole experience.

EE: Well, he’s a legendary player, I mean, someone who….he is one of the few people from the original time of the Bossa Nova. You know that I, in my case, I’m so much younger than them but because I was a child when I started, I was playing with the actual real Bossa Nova people at that time when I was 15 years old but they were already adults. I’m also the exception, but Oscar is one of the few people….I think he is the main guitar player from the Bossa Nova period who’s still alive and who plays this music incredibly, and we have a fantastic….myself with Paulo Braga, who’s the drummer, who also was the drummer with Jobim and Vicente Amigo and Marc Johnson. The four of us have an incredible communication when we do this music and I must say that we really bring the authenticity of Brazil, you know, and the Bossa Nova to every recording that we make, I mean, to every presentation that we play, because it’s there. It’s the Sao Paulo root.

Smitty: Yes. Well, you can totally feel that. Well, let’s talk about this new record, just mentioning that. I just totally enjoyed this record and some of my favorites are “Running,” I love the title track “Around the City,” and one that I can’t pronounce, is it “Chiclete Com Banana”?

EE: “Chiclete Com Banana.”

Smitty: Hey, I wasn’t too far off.

EE: Not too far.

Smitty: It’s a great tune and it’s just so alive. Tell me about that song.

EE: Well, “Chiclete” is actually one of the few songs that is not an original, but it’s a song that I listened to since I was very young in Brazil and I thought would be interesting to put it on this record because “Chiclete Com Banana” means “Chiclets with Banana.” The lyric talks about Uncle Sam, the USA playing, you know, getting together with Brazilian music and wanting to see Uncle Sam play a samba or mixing boogie woogie and mix Miami with Copacabana and it’s so interesting the way the lyric goes, so it talks a little bit about bebop, with samba, boogie woogie with American things, and it was just so right for me because of my tradition, that I have all the Brazilian tradition at the same time the jazz tradition together. So I said, oh, this is a cute one for me to sing, and I love, I mean, it’s a challenging song to sing. It has a lot of elasticity on the melody if you see, you know, you need to really reach out there, and I had fun doing it and I also like it a lot.

Smitty: Yeah.

EE: Now “Running” is a song that….I really like the message that the song has and when it talks about where I’m from, we carry on and we keep on living and we keep on running, running towards what I’ve been running from.

Smitty: Yeah, it’s almost like turning around and facing it.

EE: Yeah, sure. So I like that very much. And “Around the City” I think is a very interesting story, very original story that can happen in the big cities so much because the song is about someone who’s actually lonely and who’s going around this whole city and basically ends up meeting the person….he’s like right there, right close to her, so it’s also a message to the people who are in a big city that you know so many but you are by yourself and it can be so close you can be right there, so just don’t lose perspective.

Smitty: Yeah, absolutely, and that’s so true about big cities. So, now, talk to me a little bit about the band because I love this band. I know you mentioned some of them just now, but talk a little bit about the band and what they mean to you.

EE: Well, you know, the band, for example, Marc Johnson, who I’ve been working with since 1987….it’s almost 20 years. He is a fantastic musician, and although he is American, I could not imagine having a Brazilian bassist over him. He developed the Brazilian language and because he’s a virtuoso, he’s got an incredible technique, gorgeous intonation. He’s a true improviser and somebody who does a lot of interplay. You know, I like that.

Smitty: Yeah.

EE: I like the interplay in the music, so it’s fantastic. And Paulo Braga, who is, to me, Brazil’s best, greatest drummer for the style that we do. He is just fantastic. Oscar (Castro-Neves) we talked about, he’s incredible. Randy Brecker, who I don’t need to say much about, is one of the greatest trumpeters alive. I mean, he’s just an incredible player, plays gorgeous. And then we had some other elements on this record that were great because we had different percussionists. I had the flamenco percussionist, I had the Cuban percussionist, two different Brazilians, and we kind of mixed some elements between Latin, Bossa Nova, Brazilian music, and flamenco. We mixed different elements; for example, a song like “Oye Como Va” which is a Latin song, real heavy Latin, we mixed with Bossa Nova, and I had Cuban and Brazilian, timbales, but also the Brazilian elements in Oscar and it was really, really interesting to have that mix of the different rhythms together. So we did that.

We had other guests as well that played great, and Gene Lake is a fantastic drummer, a solid backbeat, groove, just fantastic. My producers, who were just amazing to work with, we had such a great time working together: Andres Levin, who is the leader of a group called Yerba Buena, and he is incredible, I mean, he was so familiar with my music and a fan, and he knew I wanted to do something different and he knew how to do that with me without having to compromise musically what I wanted to do but take it a step farther for what I wanted to do, so it was really great to work with him and the elements that he brought in. Like loops, we did loops on this record; we had some songs that had two drummers, very interesting stuff. Lester Mendez of course, and produced three other cuts, who is also a fantastic producer who produced a lot of pop music….he produced Shakira and others, and Jewel I believe he produced. So he also brought in a different element to this and we co-wrote songs together, so it was really a fun, fun project.

Smitty: Yes, and you blend all of those elements so well and it still has Eliane’s signature there.

EE: Oh, good. That’s what I wanna hear (Both laughing). No, that’s got to be there, you know, so I’m glad to hear that. The interesting thing is that because people that know the body of work that I have presented through the years will see that I have some recordings that feature more of myself as a composer and arranger, others that show more of the music abilities, others that bring more of the Brazilian side. I mean, there are so many different things that I have done, but they are all true to me because they are all a part of who I am.

Smitty: Yes.

EE: When I make a recording and I have all these different sides that I can put in there, it’s kind of interesting to see, well, which one is gonna be dominant, a little more this time when I make a record.

Smitty: Yes, absolutely.

EE: Around the City, the writing was really something that I wanted to put more original than my past recording called Dreamer. The one before Around the City was beautiful, all of them all Bossa Nova and standards, American and Brazilian standards, done with orchestra like a mellow, relaxing kind of a CD, but I didn’t want to make that again. I said no, I wanna sing, I wanna play things, but I want to bring something eclectic, something sophisticated, that you can actually find around a city. But I’m glad you’re hearing like that and you perceive that and feel that. That’s great.

Smitty: Oh, thank you, Smitty. It’s just a great record and your voice just resonates so well and mixes so well with the great players that you have with you. It’s just a fantastic record. I’m loving it and I know everyone else is loving it.

EE: Thank you so much.

Smitty: Yes. So, now, are you touring right now?

EE: Yes, we did 14 concerts in Japan….then took a little time off, and now we start again in September. I’m leaving at the end of next week to Europe doing promotional tours in France and then I come back and I’ll be playing New York for a week from September 19 to 24, then we play the West Coast, we are in Seattle and Los Angeles, and then we’re gonna go back to Europe and hit again France and Belgium, Spain, the U.K., Italy, do some of those countries, then we come back and do some more of them in the U.S., and we’re gonna keep touring pretty much the next year, year and a half with the new music.

Smitty: Yes, well, that’s great to hear. I know your fans around the world are waiting for you to arrive.

EE: Oh, that’s great and I can’t wait to play for them.

Smitty: Yes. Please give me your Web site.

EE: Yes. www.elianeelias.com.

Smitty: Okay, and your Web site is great. I love how easy it is to go through and you can see all the past albums of work and…

EE: Isn’t that nice? You like it? That’s great.

Smitty: Yes, it’s great, and the whole history and the tour dates and all of those great things are right there, so…

EE: You can get a sense, right, of what happened before, what was the last record…I like the way it came out. I’m glad you liked it too.

Smitty: Yes indeed. It is fantastic. So, now, other than the tour, I’m sure you’re working on some other projects and that kind of thing perhaps.

EE: Yeah, I’m always working on different things and I actually, during my time off that I had, I have been writing music, so I wrote some new songs for our next project that we will be doing sometime, I don’t know exactly when. But basically that’s what I’m doing: preparing the new show, which is ready to run, and writing some more material for the next one.

Smitty: Oh, very cool. That’s exciting.

EE: Yeah. And I’m also, you know, doing my normal stuff like during my little time off and swimming and had a nice, you know, summer and eating healthy food and exercise. (Both laughing).

Smitty: Well, that always keep you looking well, that’s for sure.

EE: Yeah, because the road is hard. We have some hard days ahead of us, so it’s good to take advantage of a little bit of time off.

Smitty: Yes indeed. Well, that’s very cool. And I must say I love the liner notes for the album, the great photographs, and all of the information, you know, that’s such a great part of the record to get to read and look at the pictures and really understand what a great record it really is.

EE: Oh, thank you so much.

Smitty: Oh, you’re so welcome. Well, Eliane, it’s been such a pleasure to talk with you and I am just really digging this record.

EE: Thank you, and thank you for all your compliments and your kind words and for your support, and I appreciate it very much.

Smitty: You are so welcome. We have been talking with the amazing Ms. Eliane Elias, she has a great new record out, it’s called Around the City, you must add this one to your collection, I highly recommend this record, and please be sure to catch her on the road, she’s going to be stopping in a lot of different cities and she’ll be playing some of this great new music. Eliane, thanks again and we certainly look forward to seeing you very soon and best of everything in 2006.

EE: For you too and thanks so much, Smitty.

Baldwin “Smitty” Smith

For More Information Visit www.elianeelias.com or www.rcavictor.com