Fay Victor Ensemble: "Joy Incarnate"

Called "bracingly, craftily brilliant" by JazzTimes and "artistically complete" by The New York Times, vocalist Fay Victor and the Fay Victor Ensemble, a trio that features Anders Nilsson on electric guitar and Ken Filiano on double bass, will give their début performance at The Jazz Gallery this Thursday, June 5th, 2014. FVE released Absinthe & Vermouth (Greene Avenue Music), their third and most recent album, last November; it features all original compositions and the same personnel that will appear on Thursday (listen to the album here). Victor has described the compositions as "whole pieces and song combinations where blurred lines are integral to the core." Prior to Absinthe & Vermouth, FVE released The FreeSong Suite in 2009, of which NPR wrote, "as if Joni Mitchell wrote lyrics for a lost Betty Carter prog-rock album," and their début Cartwheels Through the Cosmos in 2007, which JazzTimes praised as "a borderless, cacophonous, in-your-face experiment in tone poetry and free-form expression."In a May profile of Victor that appeared in Wondering Sound, Kevin Whitehead, jazz critic for NPR's Fresh Air with Terry Gross and JazzTimes contributor, highlighted the unique insider-outsider stance that contributes to Victor's distinctive musical personality:

Fay Victor knows the tradition, but stands outside of it, which is consistent with her life history: “I’ve had a passport since I was born.” That was in New York in 1965, to parents from Grenada and the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago. Her father was an UN economist soon posted to Zambia, where the family lived three years until he died in a car accident. Mom brought Fay and her younger sister home to Trinidad until she could arrange to get them all back into the States. That happened when Victor was five, but she continued to spend summers in the Caribbean. When she recorded exploded versions of vintage calypsos, as guest with the downtown quartet Other Dimensions in Music on 2010′s Kaiso Stories, she sang them in dialect. After the album came out a critic she knew asked her, “Are you even allowed to do that?”

We hope that you'll join us this Thursday in welcoming FVE to our stage on their début performance, about which Victor writes, "We are over the moon."The Fay Victor Ensemble will give its début performance at The Jazz Gallery this Thursday, June 5th, 2014. FVE features Fay Victor on vocals, Anders Nilsson on electric guitar and effects, and Ken Filiano on double bass and effects. Sets are at 9 and 11 p.m. The first set is $15.00 general admission and $10.00 for Members; the second set is $10.00 general admission and $5.00 for members. Purchase tickets here.