by dynamite | Jul 1, 2022 | Featured, Review
Born into a musical family, jazz artist Sylvia Brooks started on her musical path at a young age. Releasing her first album in 2009, Brooks boasts a long and lucrative professional career, with highlights including a spot on Bob Parlocha’s Top 50 jazz albums list, a collaboration with Grammy Nominated Kim Richmond, and accolades from veteran producer and jazz historian Arnaldo Desouteiro. This year Brooks brings us her fourth studio album. Titled Signature, this all-original collection of songs is a comprehensive look into the songwriting abilities and innate musical skill that Brooks undoubtedly possesses.
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by dynamite | Jun 17, 2022 | Featured, Review
“Authority” is a word that comes to mind when hearing Sylvia Brooks’ Signature. Over three recordings released since 2009, the singer has established herself as a master stylist capable of addressing the broad palette of songs used as vehicles for jazz vocals.
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by dynamite | May 12, 2022 | Featured, Review
SYLVIA BROOKS Signature: When last we met Brooks, she had our vote for femme fatale of the year (any year). This time around, she’s toned down her look on the front cover, not disguising her maturity but not reveling in it either. Inside the jacket, you get the lady in red looking as dangerous as ever surrounding herself with the crème of SoCal jazz and displaying a world wiseness without a Marlena Dietrich world weariness. It’s ain’t an easy trick to pull off music as cinema but she does it again here. Well done throughout.
(Rhombus 7149)
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by dynamite | May 10, 2022 | Featured, Review
On her new album Signature, Sylvia Brooks voice is both lighter in weight and darker in color – a paradox, I know. There is more jazz and bluesy feeling early on with a deep searching for the meaning of the words. I’m intrigued by her lyrics. “The Boy That Lived There” is quite moving, and I can only wonder what led her to write “Red Velvet Rope”, about the goings-on behind the doors of those Miami nightclubs. There is a lot of lived-in heartbreak in the lyrics, and the record gets moodier and more subdued down the stretch before Leonard Cohen’s Boogie Street picks up the tempo while maintaining the downbeat mood as the last cut. The sound quality on this record is excellent.
Sylvia has come into her own with this album and her writing brings this project to a new level. I highly recommend it.
– Richard Ginell
![LA Weekly Reviews Sylvia Brooks]()
by dynamite | Dec 14, 2009 | Review
Sylvia Brooks, directed by Tom Garvin on piano, and backed by Chris Colangello on bass, Kendall Kay on drums, Kim Richmond on sax and flute, and Jamie Havorka on trumpet, performed not so much a concert as dramatic musical monologues of some tasteful 20th Century standards, laced with pop-Latin pieces that may never have been lent such authority before. In the hands of this singer and this group, each song is part of a series of musical vignettes on the theme of the uneven playing field of love. (more…)
