Marta del Grandi – live at Stereolux Nantes, France – November 30, 2022 – Festival broadcast –
Marta del Grandi for the third day of the year and the first day back-from-vacation. A heady and delightful mixture of styles and genres who has not been around all that long.
Here’s what AllMusic has to say about her:
Italian vocalist and songwriter Marta Del Grandi worked primarily as a jazz singer throughout the 2010s before venturing into a compositional art pop influenced by a mix of the American 1960s West Coast sound, exotica, and the soundtracks of Ennio Morricone and David Lynch. With lyrics based on similarly out-of-the-ordinary, often mythic inspirations, she released her full-length pop debut, the intimate Until We Fossilize, in 2021.
Born in Italy, Del Grandi was working as a jazz singer based in Ghent, Belgium at the time she appeared on the Musica Jazz compilation Porsche Live: Giovani e Jazz 2011 with her quartet with Claudio Phan, Emanuele Serra, and Marco Giongrandi in 2012. As part of the Kobe Boon-founded improvisational collective Mòs Ensemble, she sang on 2019’s self-released Limbs. By that time, she was already working on solo material that reflected a departure from her background in collaborative jazz.
Del Grandi signed with indie label Fire Records for her solo debut album, 2021’s Until We Fossilize. It was self-produced back in Italy with a mix of orchestral and electronic elements, and featured drums and synths by Shahzad Ismaily, who also mixed the album from Brooklyn. Inspired by extensive travel in the late 2010s, its title referred to myths surrounding the marine fossils at the peak of the Himalayas.
Sit back, relax and press play – there’s a lot to get into. Further evidence there are a lot of artists with a lot to say in this current crop.
Bodes well for the future.
