Sylvia Brooks – A Jazz Singer & Vocalist

All About Jazz refers to Sylvia Brooks as a “Master Stylist”. With her new single Amazing Grace, one understands why. While in New York City for the 2023 Jazz Congress, Brooks felt compelled to make a pilgrimage to the National September 11 Memorial & Museum. Descending into the hallowed ground where nearly 3,000 people lost their lives, she experienced a musical epiphany as “Amazing Grace” swept over her.

Turning to Grammy Award-winning arranger John Beasley to transform that aural vision into reality, Brooks has created a wrenching, arrestingly beautiful rendition of the 18th-century English hymn. This extraordinary arrangement recasts the song’s anguish into a communal lament “that at some moments verges almost on discordant,” Brooks says. “It’s a very different version that evokes the melted steel and the souls that were lost there.”

Brooks provides all of the wordless vocals, and the sumptuous four-part harmonies evoke the awe and unspeakable sadness of the space. Beasley’s expressive piano transforms the familiar theme before Daniel Rotem’s almost spectral bass clarinet introduces the melody. Joined by Cameron Stone’s cello the piece gains mass and momentum as Beasley’s arrangement expands the hymn with Edwin Livingston’s supple acoustic bass and Jonathan Pinson’s understated drum work. Lost or found, this work seems to say, we are all wretches unequal to comprehending such loss.

Possessing a sumptuous, velvet-rich tone, Brooks gained widespread attention with her five critically acclaimed albums, which introduced her sensuous jazz-noir sound. In recent years she’s increasingly turned her attention to writing her own material with projects like 2022’s Signature, which draws on the cream of the Southland jazz scene with ace accompanists Tom Ranier and Christian Jacob.

Born and raised in Miami, Florida, Brooks came to jazz as a birthright. Her father, pianist/arranger Don Ippolito, wrote his own music for his Octet and Big Band which were performed in a series on PBS. As a first-call player, he worked with legendary artists such as Stan Getz, Buddy Rich, Peggy Lee, Sarah Vaughan and Dizzy Gillespie. Her mother, Johanna Dordick, was a conservatory-trained opera singer who also dazzled audiences singing pop tunes and standards at East Coast showrooms and resorts (she founded the Los Angeles Opera Theater in 1978, and produced 6 full seasons of Opera). Initially drawn to acting, Brooks studied classical theatre at ACT in San Francisco under the tutelage of the great directors Allen Fletcher and Bill Ball. But it was the passing of her father that called her back to her jazz roots.

With “Amazing Grace,” the inimitable Brooks makes another creative leap. Instead of unraveling the mysteries of the human heart, she plunges into the ineffable, offering the succor of an aural embrace where words are insufficient.