"Ann Dyer's music hits you in the gut while it messes with your mind," wrote the late music journalist Nicky Baxter. Excavating the primal core of her repertoire, Dyer digs into each song's essence and brings it forth on her full, facile voice. The result is a penetrating, visceral music - intelligent, yet never in danger of being intellectual.

"In a time that is informationally and technologically driven at numbing pace, it seems our world is more analytical and binary in nature than ever. I hope, through music, to draw people's awareness away from their cerebral cortexes for 90 minutes or so, and, hopefully, to create an experience that reminds them that they are flesh and blood and spirit. In Hindi there is a word, "rasa", which literally translates to "sap." It refers to life's juice - this is what fuels my music."

The raw emotional immediacy of Dyer's highly personal expression is her hallmark. "Dyer is not only emotionally authentic, [she] is revelatory," writes Down Beat magazine. The Chicago Sun Times concurs that "Dyer transcends conceptual art to let you know directly who she is." A former dancer, Dyer's unique sound seems to come from the toes up, as her entire body engages in the production of a single tone. Repeatedly words like "muscular," "visceral," and "kinesthetic" are employed to describe her music. "I approach music primarily from a energetic standpoint," she says. "I am fascinated by energy - its tangible quality, direction, blockage, interplay - which is the same thing that attracted me to being a modern dancer." She has been called "a vocal gymnast" by the Phoenix Journal, and Jazziz describes her live performances as "a seething outburst of emotional intelligence, expressed with the added body language of an experienced dancer."

Making Music

Dyer casts a wide net in creating her music. "I try to take notice of the things in my life that 'make me want to holler' and use them as a starting place," she says. "I find that inevitably these are the things - whether it be an idea, a rhythm, a tone, a conversation - that bring power to what I do." Prominent in Dyer's work are her study of Hindustani vocalizations and her love of Indian philosophy. Dyer has made two study trips to India, performing at the JazzYatra Festival in Bombay on her first excursion, and at the Hazrat Inyat Khan Darga in New Delhi on her most recent trip. Dyer and classical Hindustani vocalist Shweta Jhaveri recently shared a double bill that received a rave review in Jazziz magazine: "By following Jhaveri in the sold-out 200 seat club, Dyer invited rigorous scrutiny of her Indian influenced style. Close attention was rewarded not only by technically unimpeachable vocals, but more importantly, by soulful expressions of romantic sentiment tangled in the challenging sensual imagery of mermaids, fountains of blood, and honey licked from the knife. It was jazz reaching a level of poetry that transcended any specific cultural tie."

Dyer's involvement with North Indian music has probably had more impact on her relationship to music than on her actual sound. "Inspiration is an interesting word, as it refers to both a physical inhalation of oxygen, as well as the arrival of divine influence. As the voice is only as free as the breath beneath it, it is fundamental to me as a singer to acknowledge what inspires me, or, in other words, what frees my breath. The ultimate experience as a singer is a state of liberation that feels as if one is no longer singing but is being sung." Dyer's music has often been heralded for its transcendent quality, as in her 1998 San Francisco Jazz Festival performance of Sacred Space in San Francisco's Grace Cathedral. On a bill shared with Yusef Lateef, Tom Harrell, and Gary Peacock, Dyer's performance was called "the most explicitly spiritual music of the evening, erasing boundaries between the sacred and the profane" (Contra Costa Times).

A 'New Spin' on the Beatles In March of 2000, Dyer released her first recording for Premonition Records, Revolver: A New Spin, a re-imagining of the Beatles' groundbreaking 1966 album. "Revolver is one of the most pivotal albums in 20th-century popular music. When it came out, it was a sneak preview of the social horizon: introspective, experiential, revolutionary. For me, as a young girl, the psychedelic combination of great songwriting, crazy sound design, and the exotic was irresistible. Later, as an adult, I more fully appreciated the Beatles' turning away from "boy meets girl" story lines and the two minute AM-radio single toward a more expansive, mature music. It really launched an era, not only in their music, but in popular music at large."

Undaunted by Revolver's sacrosanct reputation among many Beatles fans, Dyer tackled the classic material with her characteristically innovative approach, first in concert and later in the studio. Dyer and her band of seven years, No GoodTime Fairies, featuring Peter Apfelbaum on tenor saxophone, Rob Burger on accordion, Jeff Buenz on guitar, John Shifflett on bass, and Jason Lewis on drums put their spin on nine of the eleven songs from the original British recording. The success of the New Spin tour prompted Dyer and the band to go into the studio with producer Brain Bacchus (Director of A. & R. for Blue Note Records) to capture the music on disc with the additions of Hafez Modirzadeh on tenor saxophone and carna (a double-reeded Persian shenai), and Carla Kihlstedt on violin. In the Revolver spirit, sound designer Rob Vlack came in to create inventive re-mixes on two of the CD's tracks. A critical hit, Revolver: A New Spin was described by Gary Giddins of the Village Voice as "less a cover than a deeply lived-in meditation, employing a panoply of styles with a sleepy-eyed luxuriousness and much wit." The CD was named one of the year's Top 5 recordings by JazzTimes, received a 4-1/2 star review from Down Beat, and inspired New York Newsday to declare, "Victory at last! Make the Beatles sound new? Darned if Dyer has come closer than anyone has - or dared to - before."

New Directions

Following Revolver: A New Spin, Dyer began performing music that is as spare and intimate as A New Spin is large and expansive. Performing with her long-time collaborators, bassist John Shifflett and drummer Jason Lewis, Dyer has assumed the unusual format of voice, bass and drums. "After doing A New Spin I felt like performing material that was exceedingly personal, close. It sounds funny to say out loud, but I kept having this image of crawling right into the chambers of the heart, like they were some sort of small, plush antechambers, and imagining the music that might be found there. That image inspired me to perform in a very elemental setting, where the voice was quite alone, and there was as much silence as sound. I chose to work with the most essential facets of the band." Dyer's voice rings clear in the stripped-down, neo-chamber format, as she sings a repertoire of originals (her own, and those of the other two band members), songs from prominent Bay Area songwriters, and compositional gems from such varied sources as Mahalia Jackson and Elysian Fields. The Ann Dyer Trio is currently performing this new material in preparation for Dyer's next recording, Of Love and Other Demons, inspired by the novel of the same title by Nobel Prize-winning author Gabriel Garc’a M‡rquez.

The Rest of the Story

A native Californian, Dyer was raised a Navy brat and lived throughout the U.S. and Mexico until settling in the San Francisco Bay Area as a young teenager. She enjoyed parallel talents as a modern dancer and pianist in her high school jazz band, but it wasn't until Dyer was well into her college education that she discovered her talent as a singer while earning her B.A. in Dance at Mills College. Initially Dyer pursued her talents separately, however her background in music and dance eventually came together in the physical, kinesthetic style of music that has come to define her work.

That ineffable quality is in plentiful supply on Dyer's 1995 debut album on Mr. Brown Records, entitled Ann Dyer & No Good Time Fairies (her band deriving its name from a Steve Coleman composition). This disc is a progressive expression of Dyer's jazz origins featuring crackling renditions of standards like "I'll Remember April" and "Green Dolphin Street," along with other well-known pieces given an invigorating twist through Dyer's original lyrics, like McCoy Tyner's "Contemplation" and Wayne Shorter's "Pinocchio" (re-titled "Tell Me the Truth"). The CD was called one of the "Top-10 Best New Music Releases" of the year in CD Review and the Austin Chronicle, and received kudos for its adventurous, irreverent spirit with Stereophile pronouncing the recording "as exciting as music gets."

Dyer's consummate musicianship and daredevil confidence have won her international acclaim, including being voted "Talent Deserving Wider Recognition" in Down Beat's International Critics Poll for six consecutive years (1995-2000). She has received the Bay Area Music Award (BAMMIE) for "Outstanding Jazz Vocalist," and a BAMMIE nomination for her first CD. "Wide recognition" has come from appearances at some of the country's most prestigious festivals. The Village Voice called her appearance in the Knitting Factory's New York Jazz Festival "a sizzling performance," adding, "The standing room-only crowd, who were on their feet, loudly praised the music," and following her Monterey Jazz Festival performance, the San Francisco Examiner wrote, "Dyer's live performances are wildly exotic, an incomparable audio-visual experience." But when all is said and done, the Philadelphia City Paper brought it down to the most essential thing to remember about Ann Dyer when they wrote simply "this bird can sing."

January 2001