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Mia Žnidarič Press Highlights
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The singer Mia, the pianist Steve Klink, the bass player Henning Gailing and the drummer Kruno Levacic achieved something quite extraordinary in the Philharmonic Hall: Thanks to their feeling for the music and a maturely prepared performance they unraveled the mysterious beauty of the songs, called jazz standards. It has to be said that the attraction of these songs lies in their harmony between melody and rhythm...something Mia is well aware of: with carefully designed musical phrases, sensual glissandos and tremolos she is slipping from the rationality of the language into the magic of pure music. Besides the singer we should mention the original share of arrangements with which Steve Klink added new sonic colours to the standards as well as the inventive performance put up by the drummer and percussionist from Zagreb, Kruno Levacic. He was the man who provided the necessary spontaneity and unpredictability to the concert, without which there is no jazz happening. An evening in which the trio demonstrated how a singer should be accompanied, how she should be helped and encouraged to be able to develop her expression fully, brought about a few pleasant conclusions: after a long period of time we have a first-rate Slovenian jazz singer. Mia has proven that her decision not to sing any trash hit music was right. She has been perfecting her technical knowledge- her impeccable intonation is helping her a lot at that. She sings what she masters. Her repertoire is becoming richer and more varied, and I dare predict a bolder and impending excursion into the labyrinths of improvisation. To conclude: Mia and Steve Klink put up a concert which was, in spite of the performers' youth, professionally as well as in terms of the stage performance and the modeling of the sound material, thoroughly planned and prepared. "Nezni nagovori pesmic" by Milan Dekleva English translation by Tajda Lekse And finally, our musician, the drummer Kruno Levacic, in the Steve Klink Trio and together with Mia. His presence always guarantees good music and his friends from Koeln, where the American pianist Klink and the German contra-bass player H. Gailing have been playing for quite some time, were excellent at accompanying the young Slovenian singer Mia. They were well-trained, innovative and their virtuoso performance was one of the best examples of good jazz music. Mia has been working for some years now with our young jazz musicians, but she has only now appeared in front of the audience in Zagreb and made a very good impression. More than the average vocal capacity, her natural interpretation of passionate ballads ("Squeeze me") or of shameless passion ("Sleeping Bee") and the astonishment in front of the order and disorder of this world, and all this expressed with an unusual virtuosity and truthfulness. Mia easily reaches notes with a rhythmic precision of a high quality vocal expression. It seems as if she had wrapped herself round her carefully selected songs respecting their message and establishing her own variations of the melody. We can conclude from all this that Mia is a real discovery, and when she improves her stage appearance, adds to her repertoire a few up-tempo songs, we'll have to acknowledge that she is probably the best female jazz singer who, considering the nearness of Slovenia, sings in our proximity. "Peti medunarodni dani jazza..." by Miro Krizic English translation by Tajda Lekse With her, everything is a moment. She can sing the same song only for a month or two. Then it seems to her that she already told everything just a moment before. She needs a new song. It's true that this is very strenuous for the musicians she works with, but that's the whole charm of it, too. When she finds the right song -- sometimes she is still pondering upon it between four and seven in the morning -- she tries to feel it and interpret it in her own way. And every time in some other way, because something new happens to her every time she sings it. Every time something new, she dares more every time. All great female jazz singers -- if we come to think about it, we could hardly find many great male jazz singers -- were fighting their way through existential and social difficulties; they were brought up in the ghettos of black people, they didn't have any families and they always loved the wrong kind of men...All this contributed to the persuasive note of their singing about the eternal victims, this all brought about the unbearable sadness of their voices...The sexual revolution, female and racial emancipation (whatever these are!) have perhaps made such extreme experiences impossible. But Mia, even though she isn't black and her man doesn't beat her, feels related to the sad stories of her idols since she has had quite a few bitter experiences herself. All of her life she dreamt of becoming a singer. Not a star. A singer who would sincerely love her profession. So she kept listening to Billie Holiday, she listened and didn't eat, didn't sleep. Considering the fact that she came to do what she is doing now as an ordinary worker, she knows exactly what it means to be doing something you don't want to do. Or to experience things which shouldn't happen to you. She had to leave behind the patterns she was taught as a child and find her own ones. And that requires a lot of strength.... When she, by chance, found herself side by side with the American piano player Steve Klink last autumn, they decided right after their tour with the Big Band Orchestra that she should make a quieter, softer, and a more intimate album next. And so, in the midst of the summer heat this year, Steve, the German counter-bass player Henning Gailing, and the 19 year old Irish drummer Darren Beckett came to Ljubljana. Mia put them up at her place where they cooked together (the guys doing the dishes!), walked the dog, and in the meantime occupied the Studio Tivoli for three days, working with Janez Krizaj, excellent sound engineer and producer. Before, all Mia's songs were recorded live, at concerts, because she didn't feel she could give as much in a cold studio as in front of an audience, on stage. But when she put on her earphones and glanced at the three musicians she felt united with them in a single "silence within music," confidence, friendship, love...Every day they played twice all the songs from her repertoire and what turned out to be impeccable in the end was included in Mia's album "Hold My Hand," so far her favorite. "It was very tiring, but beautiful. We all knew those creative moments would be recorded forever. We had to do our best. There are no half ways." ...It doesn't surprise us, therefore, that this album sounds different from her previous ones. It doesn't concern only the arrangements; this album is what we could call the real, the original sound of jazz. Also her voice and her pronunciation of English have been perfected. The recordings for the Film "Grandma Goes South," and the albums "It's Just Luck" and the first Slovenian small sized CD "What a Wonderful World," the cassette for children "Mia, the Dwarf and the Dreamer," and another jazz project in Slovene, "No, No, It's Not to be Done," recorded with the Big Band, these are all a huge lesson - more or less good, more or less costly (if we only think of incessant organization and money problems.) In a way, it seems as if Mia didn't believe any more in what she did in the past. "Time enriches us. Every time I go off the stage, I know more, I'm able to do more, I know better what I want and how I want to say it; that's how I progress. If I stayed in the same place, I've nothing more to do on stage. If in two months this album doesn't sound as good to me as it does now, I will have moved a step further." "Na soncni strani Zivljenja" by Bostjan Malus Stop, Nov. 3 - 9, 1995 English translation by Tajda Lekse It is ages since I have heard an album of such sincere, pure and beautiful music! There is no pretence, no contrivance. Quite the opposite: it is a unanimous affirmation, a bursting forth, a glow of sounds and a surrender to music. The album by Mia Znidaric and the Steve Klink Trio is a sticking-plaster on the wound of a hysterical and deformed world whose triumph is the spectacular nature of artificial worlds and computer simulations, an album masking itself in consecration and divinity. Here, on this album, we find consecrated and deified humanity, the heroism of our transitoriness, which is at the same time the gift of song. The gift of song is our spiritual and biological truth, whether we want it or not. Our common calling is the call to words and sounds, the incantation of time. It is, in other words, our measure and destiny, the pulse and consciousnes of momentary eternity and eternal momentariness. This is what Mia Žnidarič's songs deal with, and thus they are full of noble sadness, yearning and melancholy. But beware! They are never spasmodically pathetic or dissatisfied with man's position in an infinite world. Wherever we are going we are paupers in the footsteps of princes. Mia knows, despite her youth (or perhaps because of it) that the most banal occurrences and images of our daily existence are a miracle, a death and a resurrection, a game of silences and sound. The power of Mia's singing lies in her formulation of sound, in the quavering of her throat, in the glissandos and tremolos which follow the naturalness and regularity of breathing, our first and last song. Hidden in the details, her manner of expressing a lyric or melodic phrase, there lies the inspiration of the moment, a source of improvisation and unrepeatability. This album does nothing to excess, in the same way that there is no excess in the swelling of spring, the colour of October, the whiteness of snow and the wetness of an animal's snout. At the end of the millennium, after the barbarisms we have witnessed, at the threshold of apocalyptic dread, we have reached the beginning of history. Once again we are cruel but kind-hearted. Most of all, we are mysterious and unpredictable beings. The music of Mia Žnidarič, Steve Klink, Henning Gailling and Krunoslav Levacic is an itinerary of this beginning, a gentle whisper of the unspoilt and unblemished possibilities of being here like a song, to be and to sing. Milan Dekleva |
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