Born into a family of accomplished musicians, jazz bass player Chris Minh Doky seeked to become a doctor. His Danish mother is a former pop singer and his Vietnamese father is a classical guitarist and medical doctor. Out of boredom Chris started playing classical piano when he was six years old. In the few years that followed he won three awards at the Royal Danish Conservatory for Classical Music. When he was fifteen, he picked up the electric bass by accident. Two years later Doky started playing the upright bass as a result of hearing the Miles Davis album, My Funny Valentine. A year later the Royal Danish Conservatory for Contemporary Music gave the young musician a reward for his accomplishments with the upright bass…
New York City can be like a jungle. With a menagerie of people intermingling in seemingly never ceasing action, the City has ecosystems within ecosystems. Vibraphonist/composer Yuhan Su has been inspired by her chaotic new home and her experiences with the individuals she has met there. Her new recording, City Animals, captures her enthusiasm for the craziness of the City and the adventures she has had since her arrival. Originally from Taiwan, Su came to the States in 2008 to further her music studies at Berklee College of Music in Boston, where she expanded her classical percussion knowledge to the world of jazz and improvisation. In 2012, Su moved to New York; she fell in love with the City and immediately immersed herself in the wilds of the jazz scene.
This album contains a collection of works from the Seicento, most of them well known and recorded several times, although it also includes a composition (Cazzati’s La Verità sprezzata) that is little or not very often heard. It is a repertoire to which we have usually devoted ourselves. That is why we wanted to propose our own way of doing it, in all honesty and avoiding fashions and artifice, without pretentiousness, respecting only the rhetorical —and dramatic— discourse implicit in the texts and their setting to music, fleeing from affectation —but not from affetti— and unquestioned customs, taking advantage of the information provided by musicological research, making use of our intuition and experience, and also remembering the teaching we have received from our old masters. Inspired by Ripa’s allegory and by the idea of truth as άλήθεια or unveiling of the self that is hidden by the veil of appearance, we have endowed our performance with a certain natural simplicity, a deliberate nakedness, especially in moments of particular emotional intensity.