Jazzilan

Songs of love, lust and longing

Jessie’s French, English and Portuguese vocals lead her musicians through changing scenes and warm colours. The atmosphere thus created breathes the sensual energy that emanates from artists like Vanessa Paradis, Madeleine Peyroux and Astrud Gilberto. Personal lyrics on intimacy, longing, love’s limits and limitations fuse with acoustic electro, bossa nova & jazz.
JAZZILAN will start recording its first full CD during August 2011. The outstanding jazz magazine jazzmozaïek has published an article on the band in April 2011 from an interview with Jessie and Jeroen. The band’s first single La Baladine was played live on ATV, ROB TV and TV Oost, all in the course of 2011. In the second half of 2011, JAZZILAN will play concerts in eg Tervuren, Mechelen and Bree.

Compositions and arrangements are mainly by piano player Jeroen Malaise. Outside JAZZILAN he can also be heard on piano in the motion picture The Red Lantern and in several compositions for Klara For Kids. He is also working with music theatre Transparant on a regular basis. Jeroen, Jessie, Dima and Steven are playing together for quite a while. Since 2009 they performed under the project name Groove Juice Special at eg De Hopper in Antwerp, at Jazz At Home and Jazzenede 2010. (Jazz At Home invited JAZZILAN again for a concert on 18 September 2011.) After having achieved the Costa Jazz Public Award in 2009, the band hired Jan Hautekiet as musical coach and producer for their first single La Baladine. This single was recorded in Pino Guaracci’s studios and released on 4 December 2010. Today, it can still be purchased through iTunes. Simultaneously with the release, the band changed its name into JAZZILAN.

What follows is a short excerpt from the lyrics of Mirage, one of the songs that will feature on JAZZILAN’s upcoming full CD: The years have gone, the spell untied, in new love I could hide. Each day I pray my mind deceives me. Then the mirror throws your smile right at me. Erase me, delete me, start… Heat runs through the lyrics of Pan African Colours: Yellow the sand of the dunes near Kalahari, the heat will haunt you for so long… Deep red like the blood stained earth of Yaoundé. Why are you so deep in my soul? Shackels and chains beat the rhythm, millions of voices will always tell us…

MORE INFO ON RELEASE SOON…