The vocal quartet säje visits the Eastman School of Music on Saturday, April 6 as part of their debut album release tour and just on the heels of a recent GRAMMY Award win. The group performs on the Kilbourn Concert Series at 7:30 p.m. in Kilbourn Hall, and will give an earlier guest master class for Eastman students in Eastman’s East Wing at 2:30 p.m.
The ensemble’s name, säje (rhymes with “beige”), is derived from the names of the four singers, which includes Sara Gazarek, the newly appointed Associate Professor of Jazz Voice at Eastman School of Music, along with Amanda Taylor, Johnaye Kendrick, and Erin Bentlage.
Although it’s the first GRAMMY win for the quartet, they received an earlier unlikely GRAMMY nomination as a nascent ensemble.
When the singers first banded together to test out possibilities as a vocal quartet, the group wasn’t signed to a label, had only one performance under their belts at the 2020 Jazz Education Network Conference in New Orleans, and didn’t know what direction säje would even go yet.
Then the Coronavirus pandemic hit, performances were canceled, and they were in lockdown.
To keep the momentum going, the singers released a live performance video of their first original composition, “Desert Song.”
In the video, all four singers sit side-by-side with microphones in hand and wearing individuated versions of blue jean jumpsuits. A guitarist sits to the left of the screen, and a bassist is eventually revealed. The work opens with a bare guitar accompaniment. Their soft voices start in unison with a sweet, undulating melody about the ocean. It almost seems folksy until the voices then fan out into a technicolor chord, as the singers slowly reveal their capable voices. The harmonies continue to gain complexity as the song develops and ends with a whimsical, chromatic a capella coda. It’s not hard-hitting jazz; it is a delicate and fresh jazz that draws on other contemporary idioms, such as indie and folk music, yet finds ever-interesting textures and complexities in the harmonies and vocal interchanges.
Based on the positive response they received, Gazarek, a member of the Recording Academy in Los Angeles, “threw caution into the wind” and submitted the composition for 2021 GRAMMY Award consideration in the Best Arrangement, Instrumental and Vocals category.
To säje’s surprise, the self-released recording—the group’s very first—received a GRAMMY nomination.
Gazarek recalls that the ensemble was floored when they found out. “For this fairly tender composition that exists in predominantly one tonal center, that has some pretty complex compositional tools that are being used in a subversive way, to be acknowledged by these craft committees that exist around the country in one of the few categories that exists that’s still voted on by people who are experts in that field… It was a huge compliment to have them say to the world that this kind of music, where there’s more exhale than there is inhale, is welcomed in this space.”
“What is the sound of säje?” is a common question for the group.
“I would say more than anything, it’s just the permission to incorporate a really wide spectrum of emotional musical, textural landscapes, free from this charge of having things be really strong and powerful and defined,” explained Gazarek. “It’s more textural and wide.”
And feminine. The four singers make a clear delineation between what they do and the male-dominated jazz aesthetic. Or, as Gazarek puts it, “value systems that have been set form by this male-dominated genre of music that determines what is good and valuable, and hip and cool.”
The crunchy harmonies, intricate rhythms, and melodic spectrum in their music seem impossibly hard to hit using the nebulous instrument that is one’s voice, but Gazarek says the real challenge is different. “It’s ensuring that everything that we’re doing in any given moment, is reflective of the decisions that we’ve made prior.”
That includes things like blending, phrasing, and tuning.
“Tuning is such a variable,” she explains. “It’s informed by tongue tension and laryngeal placement, and overtones, and all of these things that you don’t even necessarily think about. But if I have a different approach to jaw tension than the person who is singing lead does, it’s going to be out of tune. It’s that three percent approach to pitch that if our lead soprano is three cents sharp, and I’m three cents flat, that’s catastrophic in our ensemble.”
“Singing in säje is hands down the hardest thing I’ve ever done musically in my life, for sure.”
But it’s the kind of singing that is getting noticed by musicians like Jacob Collier—the popular polymath singer, songwriter, and instrumentalist known for oozing harmony in his ever-interesting reharmonizations of popular tunes—who joined säje on the track “In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning” for its debut album.
Gazarek says that most people think Collier wrote the vocal arrangement. But, instead, he showed up to the recording studio and “he improvised seven different versions of ‘Wee Small Hours of the Morning.’ And each of them was wildly different from the other.” Then, säje picked a favorite version and composed for their vocal prowess around him, “which I think was a new experience for him to give that kind of trust and willingness over to someone else to write around him as someone who predominantly does that himself.”
But Collier’s embrace of contemporary sounds and expansive harmonies sits squarely within säje’s aesthetic.
Collier won’t be touring with säje, but säje will perform tracks from that GRAMMY-winning album (which is also self-released) and gives Eastman’s audience a glimpse of what comes next with works from their second album in-progress.
As Gazarek puts it, “People can expect to hear thoughtful, intentional, expressive, contemporary jazz music.”
***
Kilbourn Concert Series: säje
Saturday, April 6 at 7:30 p.m. | Kilbourn Hall
Click here for tickets.