At sixteen, Santi interned for Philadelphia International record label. After a few record company gigs, she became disillusioned, and set off on a more creative path. Soon after, Santi executive produced and wrote much of the debut album of Geffen recording artist Res. After finishing that project in 2001, she began writing songs for herself, deciding to share her creativity with the world, and thus Stiffed formed. The Philadelphia based, punk-influenced rock band consists of White, Matt Schleck, Chris Shar and Chuck Treece.

First things first: while Santi respects No Doubt, she thinks “it a little simplistic to be compared to Gwen Stefani.” Since you don’t get to see the many Black women who don’t sing R&B, let alone female leads in a band, the comparison to Stefani seems to be
the only way to describe a vocal style unfamiliar to commercial listeners, which to White is thoughtless. “Just like back in 1997, everybody not singing like Mary Blige was said to sound like Erykah Badu. People need an easy reference point.”

Upholding the “rocker” identity is somewhat of a test itself. Santi considers herself an organic artist, which means music and art override style and persona. The pressure and expectations for performers to always be “on”, or that women should show more skin make it a bit difficult to focus on the artistry, which is what Santi maintains.

All you need to know about Santi White is that she is a true artist who wants her music and art to impact a lot of people. “I want to make a living doing something that will matter, that can change people”. Santi White may just leave a lasting mark on the quintessence of what the music industry has somewhat lost – a passion for the art.

Imagine walking into a dark, cramped club at midnight to see your favorite band. Excited, you head to the bar and order a beer. As you look around to see if you know anyone within the large crowd of revelers, you notice that there are a number of people staring at you. Is it my newly trimmed Mohawk? My nose piercing? My Misfits T-shirt? And then the excitement to see the band slowly dissipates.

People are staring at you because you are the only black person in the crowd.

After years hanging out in the punk scene, director James Spooner decided to document the lives and experiences of African-Americans in the punk scene, opening a much-needed dialogue about the politics that ensue when a black person gets involved in the punk community. As a teenager, he lived the life as a punk rock fan, enjoying and learning from the DIY (do it yourself) ethnic that emanated from the hardcore Washington DC punk scene. But as he grew older, he realized that trying to blend his punk aesthetic with his burgeoning afrocentricty was not only difficult, but doing it alone was even worse.

And that’s how Afro-Punk was born. The 66-minute documentary is the tale of young, gifted and black people who have dedicated their lives to the punk scene. Some are looking for absolution from previous attempts of assimilation within the media’s limited view of democracy, some are looking for love, some simply for a space where they are free to express themselves. Since it’s initial grassroots distribution in the spring of 2003, Afro-Punk has received nationwide critical acclaim and demands to have the documentary screened across the world have been astounding. It has also spawned an informative website with an active message board in which people from different regions, genders and economic backgrounds have become united for only one thing: their passion for punk.

www.afropunk.com

‘Singing about being miserable doesn’t interest me. What I’m interested in is passion.’ – Jo Swan

Slinky, sexy and slightly mysterious, Ilya have pioneered a new genre of epic easy listening they like to call desert noir – a place where Ennio Morricone meets film noir, where Nino Rota’s Godfather soundtracks mingle with polkas and waltzes, where Jacques Brel is fused with Scott Walker, James Bond, Ipanema style and Curtis Mayfield’s basslines – and something completely fresh and new somehow emerges from the gaps in between.

‘Each song is like a little theatre production,’ says Jo, whose sensuous, smoky voice powers Ilya’s songs, each one of them an instant classic. The lyrics are poetic, ambiguous, and little is what it first seems in Ilya’s larger than life world: a song full of drug imagery turns out to be about the soul-cleansing power of music; another track is clearly about the end of a love affair, but you’re never quite sure whether the woman singing about it is mad, sad or glad. ‘There’s a lot of humour in the lyrics,’ continues Jo. ‘But you can also read them in lots of different ways. It’s setting a scene, and when I’m singing them it’s like I’m embodying a personality – I’m aware of all the atmosphere and all the feelings that go with the mood of each song.’

All from the Clifton area of Bristol, Jo, her partner Nick Pullin and Dan Brown are the names behind Ilya’s 21st century torch songs. Before she’d even reached her teens Jo was testing out that voice, hanging out in local bus stops singing Beatles songs with her two best friends. Later the three friends sang in a band with Nick on guitar. The band didn’t last but Nick and Jo did, moving in together and continuing to make music together.

Their earliest demo tapes were filled all noir influences, sound effects, radio disturbance. ‘They were these funny little old-fashioned, weird, slightly surreal songs,’ they recall. ‘But then we went off on a tangent because we kept bringing other people in to work with us and the sound got dissipated from the thing we really loved.’

A little later, Bristol was to become well-known for this kind of effortless mixing of genres, for its experiments with texture and sound, but although Nick and Jo were well-known on the city’s live circuit, they were never really part of the any scene. They were never particularly ambitious – they just made music for the sheer joy of it. ‘It was natural. We’ve always enjoyed doing the music, and success wasn’t really anything to do with it. You can’t stop.’

And then Dan came along. A guitarist who had fallen in love with programmed beats and become a bit of a studio whiz, they called him in to help produce some demos. He was living in Leeds at the time, but soon after they asked him to come back home to Bristol. ‘We knew he was the missing link!’ declares Jo, while Dan says he too had found what he’d been looking for: ‘I just loved their songs. I knew I had to work with them.’

But it still took another four years for it all to come together. While working on their music at home, they earned money by playing at weddings and functions. The idea was to cover sophisticated jazz standards like ‘The Man I Love’ and Summertime’, but inevitably as the drink flowed someone would stagger up to them and call for something harder or faster. So they’d add a heavy dub bassline to the songs, a few drum’n’bass beats, or whatever else happened to come to mind. It kept the crowd moving, it kept them amused, and somewhere along the line they began to realise that they were onto something. ‘It all got mixed up,’ says Dan, ‘and it began to sound really interesting.’

They started taking the same approach with their own songs, deconstructing them, playing with them until, experimenting with no barriers. The resulting mixture of genres, eras and styles sounds so fresh because it was so unforced. ‘It was very organic, the references are integrated rather than just pasted on,’ says Nick. ‘We just did whatever felt right for the song.’

All of the tracks on their debut EP and album were recorded in Jo and Nick’s tiny house and Dan’s even smaller flat in Clifton, and such a lavish, orchestral big sound could only have been made here and now, when the technology has finally caught up with their musical ambitions. ‘We’ve got a panoramic, lush sound, and we wouldn’t have been able to do that on our budget 5-10 years ago,’ explains Dan. It gave them the freedom to do exactly as they wanted, and as a result Ilya sound like everything and yet nothing you’ve ever heard before.

So it’s been a long time coming, this music. It’s been fermenting, quietly in a Bristol suburb for years, but now it’s finally ready to move out into the world. When it comes to quality, we all know that you just can’t rush these things. But now Ilya are ready. And it’s been worth the wait.

www.sanilya.com

“Lizz Fields is one of the brightest shining stars we have on the horizon.” – DJ Jazzy Jeff/ A Touch of Jazz

When who you are meets who you want to be, the occasion is sometimes unexpected. The journey to this point may elude you but when you think about it for a moment, it all seems perfectly clear. For Lizz Fields these are both true statements. Her own journey to becoming a singer/songwriter has been just that. On stage or in a living room on a sofa, Lizz Fields has an energy about her that is infectious. Most would say it is her girlish charm or down right silliness. Others would mix that with her sexiness or is it her sensuality? Regardless of either or and both, her smile does give much of her away but in the end it is her voice that makes you gasp. By Day By Night is the title of the independent album by a very independent singer and songwriter by the name of Lizz Fields. It is also the process she took to become this person.

By Day By Night is an album made up of instrumental sounds, rhythms and strong vocal riffs that are at once extremely jazzy but at the same time original in tone and cadence. As Lizz relates her own tales to the listener, you feel at once a part of the song and also realize that you haven’t heard anything like this with a voice so sultry and smooth. You might suspect this to be a Billie Holiday and A Tribe Called Quest collaboration but no, you just heard Lizz Fields’ debut album, which is to be released October 26, 2004 via ABB Soul, a division of ABB Records. The North American October release will feature four new compositions and remixes of favorites like “I Gotta Go” by DJ Spinna (Beyond Real Productions) and “When I See Love” by ColdFusion (G-Unit, Skillz, Musiq). The new songs will be added to crowd approved composures like “Star Gazer,” the bass heavy “Hey,” and favorites like “Say the Word” and “Selfish Tendencies”. These twelve tracks will be new to most but, loved by all.

To begin to understand By Day By Night, you should understand what Lizz Fields likes musically. “I like big heavy beats, dark heavy bass. I like crazy ambient ethereal sounds. Sometimes I liken it to these crazy sounds you hear from Tricky, Bjork, or Portishead with hip-hop beats [but] at the same time I like it to be musical [with] changes that aren’t always expected,” Lizz notes, “I like minor chords and challenging music, music that’s difficult to sing [like] Say the Word. That song is hard because I am the only one singing what I am singing. The melody I am singing, no one is playing that.”

But to truly understand her as an artist, you have to understand her position on being an artist. She envisions herself as a quintessential artist judged not on one mega hit but a body of work that improves and grows as she does as an artist perfecting her craft. Her music is an original blend of jazz over dark hip hop beats and has been capturing hearts, dollars, euros and yens with songs like “I Gotta Go”, “Selfish Tendencies” and “Say the Word”. Even as she brings forth these melodies and phrases, Fields smiles to herself because these songs that are selling are the same songs that established producers and record labels questioned and didn’t think would take off when she sent them as her demo.

Before becoming the artist known as Lizz Fields, she had to first conquer her fear of singing and find her voice as the student, teacher, set designer and thespian known as Lizz Fields. She was a vocal major at the Philadelphia Creative & Performing Arts High School. Her soprano voice, which we know now to be strong, jazzy, and well controlled, was the same but in high school; she knew that her voice wasn’t like the voice of the shining stars in her high school like Boys II Men or Amel Larrieux. She opted to become the charismatic individual that we see on stage – infectious, silly and honest. Fields knew she loved jazz; Duke Ellington’s Mood Indigo was her anthem. “The song was real smooth and kind of sensual. I thought songs like that were cool. Why doesn’t everybody sing like that? I never forgot the song, that was the Lizz song, but I sang it until I wrote my own songs” Fields recalls. When she found her voice in the church choir it was an epiphany. Lizz made the song fit her but she had other struggles to conquer before she was ready to be who she is now.

The evolution from trepid singer to full-fledged artist wasn’t as clear and paved a path as one might think. By Day By Night began as a demo that was never intended to be an album. It was intended to showcase the singing and songwriting talent. It became an album when she realized that the patrons of her part time job liked, commented and asked if what they heard was for sale while she played her demo songs. Lizz Fields evolved into the independent artist when she began to sell her music and fans bought it locally, nationally and internationally 60 CDs here, 50 there, 20 over here, license to distribute in Japan, license to distribute in the United Kingdom and so on. She struggled and persevered learning the entire independent business after she was a selling independent artist and has yet to stop. This is her life, her music, her struggle and her love by day by night. Every vocation she has had from high school to present has prepared her for it. Be it performing for friends, students, crowds at the theatre or the crowds listening to her sing her own songs on stage, Fields continues to grow by day, by night.

Her sound is deep, rich in the myriad traditions that she mixes so confidently. She is a storyteller who paints word-pictures that give her tales of hardship, survival and love a vivid sense of reality. A dynamic musician, Maya Azucena bravely disrupts the popular metaphors of wealth and glorified sexuality, forcing us to rethink artificial images of life and beauty. Her release, Live From New York proves she is all these things in one.

A Brooklyn native who first found her voice at the age of four and developed her skills at New York’s High School of the Performing Arts, Azucena has already had an impressive career although her debut album has yet to be released. Some of her career highlights include opening for Roy Ayers and the Isley Brothers, performing at the world famous Blue Note, forming her own band, and starring in a film and musical. Her music is indicative of these exciting experiences and shows that this vocalist has remarkable potential.

With songs such as “G-Hetto”, “Walk for Miles” and “Runaway Blues”, on her LP, Azucena poignantly addresses the pain of inner-city life when dreams and ambition are all that one has. However, leaving no room for pity Azucena radiates a dynamic energy through these same songs that lead to inspiration. With a powerful band, and live performances, this vocalist fuses jazz with the blues, R&B and soul. You can hear the influences of Chaka Khan, Stevie Wonder, Prince and the Sugar Hill Gang. A little Latin flava rounded out with some serious hip-hop flows makes this quite an eclectic sound. With a cultural background that includes being part African-American, Cherokee, Jamaican, Scottish and English, Azucena embraces many looks and sounds. Her music might not be what you except, but sometimes we all need something different to spice up our lives.

www.mayaazucena.com

Though her unique and infectious sounds have repeatedly saturated the airwaves
of Toronto urban radio, people easily recognize her sound, but not yet her
name. With attention-getting songs as “Housework” and “Where
I’m Goin’”, her pervasive sound has been known to provoke
the question, “Who is that?” Answer: She is Melanie Durrant.

Simply being heavily rotated on local radio has not done her sound any justice.
The proof of her uncompromising, original style and wide-ranging vocal abilities
can only be found in her live performances. Her energetic and crowd-moving
stage shows have become expected of this soulful Torontonian soloist as she
gained recognition from a largely underground audience at such events as Honey
Jam. After scoring a deal with a major record label like Motown / Universal,
she has more recently moved her act to larger venues, opening for such artists
as 50 Cent and Jay-Z, Sean Paul among others, identifying herself among a
more mainstream crowd.

On her debut CD Where I’m Goin’, Melanie reveals her potent capabilities
as writer, arranger and vocalist with sounds ranging from reggae to blues
to downright R&B/Soul. Although most songs on her album are distinct in
their own right, they are each strung together by a strong, soulful element,
catchy lyrics, and the ability to make your head bob unconsciously. Her lyrics
are also deeply personal, giving the album, and the singer herself, a very
unpretentious quality. Because this unique songstress can so easily adapt
her vocals to a sundry of different sounds, her style has yet to be accurately
categorized.

With her unapologetic stage presence, the ability to move both underground
and mainstream audiences, why is it that people still ask the question, “Who?”
When stating the name Melanie Durrant?

Why do you think people know your sound more than you know your actual name?

A name is a name. I’m terrible with names so I don’t really expect people
to remember my own. I never remember names, so, maybe that’s the big payback,
who knows? (Laughs). You know songs are how people relate to feelings. So
maybe they were feeling determined to do something one day and the song caught
them, they were just like, "I’m gonna get to where I’m going, too!"
So they remember the song.

Do you think it’s because you have yet to release a video and people haven’t
attached a visual representation to your sound?
Definitely, definitely.

Talk about your new video.
The video is for “Where I’m Going”. That’s the single that we’ve been doing.
And it’s about a journey to a final destination. It’s about the people that
I meet along the way and things that I experience.

Who is your core audience? Who are you singing to?
Everyone, I’m singing to the children so I don’t say bad words. And I’m singing
for the grown-ups. I’m singing for everybody who’s a person.

As a Canadian, have you come to find that being recognized and garnered
by Americans has been the benchmark of a recording artists’ success?
No I don’t really think it’s about them, quite honestly. It’s about everybody,
every country, every people. If they don’t understand the words, they feel
the rhythm or they like the melody. But I did notice a lot of people aim to
be accepted in the States. Basically it’s just like the song says, ‘New York,
New York, if you can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere!’ You know?

I’m not saying it’s not important to be recognized by Americans, because
it definitely is important. But I’m not focusing my energy on them alone.
Canada is where I’m from and I’m really proud to be Canadian, which is why
I yell at the end of my show, “I am Canadian!” because I think as Canadians
we need to show some more patriotism, as a whole, and stop looking at why
Americans are so proud of themselves and start being proud of ourselves.

Describe your meeting with Kedar Massenberg (CEO of Motown/Universal).

I’ve done Motown shows with my mother. So to actually be in Motown Records
was really shocking. I don’t think I was in my body. I was just observing.

In your song, "Where I’m Going", you say, "I’m gonna get
to where I’m going," where is that place?
Where is that place? Basically to success. It isn’t an actual physical place.
It’s in here (points to temple). It’s the place of happiness. It’s total satisfaction.

How do you manage to stay so humble? Does being Canadian have a lot to
do with it? (Sighs modestly.) I don’t know. I don’t know. I didn’t
think of myself as anything. (Laughs).

Wrapping up her a recent performance at the Revival, in front of local, hometown
industry socialites, the modest Melanie needlessly feels she must remind us
of who she is.

“As for me, I’m Melanie. And if you don’t know, now you know!” She’s gonna
get to where she’s going. From where she is now, she’s not too far away.