By: Estefanía Romero
The captivating quality on the arrangements and compositions made by Bria Skonberg, relies on the different discursive atmospheres she can take us to, all these embedded within an admirable creativeness and intelligence.
This trumpeter, jazz singer, and bandleader, accomplishes the possibility to fly among diverse places throughout fun, elegant, sexy, defiant, soft or energic music. She’s not afraid to approach the New Orleans jazz style, as much as to walk into other music related to it, such as the beautiful funeral chants that became part of jazz before this genre even started to breathe. She is also capable to give us a taste of the 60’s rock when it was pretty much identified with the organ sound. This and much more is shaped into her own sound, which manages to also understand the timbre and expressive values of the music from different genres.
She knows how to keep the balance on the instrumentation of her ensemble and is perfectly aware on how to keep her super clean jumps of register to create culminating moments. She understands timing on improvisations. Even more, Skonberg incorporates vanguard elements to show the best of this world without falling into music that doesn’t make any sense.
This is how, along a compendium of hallucinating interpretations, the unpredictable navigates the predictable, and creates effectively an extra force of surprise within the classic elements of the jazz world, without losing melodicity.
Finally, I’d like just to say that Skonberg, with the sweetness of a singer and poet of the XXI Century, and the aggressiveness of a great trumpet player, slashes our jugular veins indeed. Hence, this brilliant Canadian woman takes us into a marvelous dream, no matter what music we prefer.