Album Notes

BARE is the debut recording from The ExPosed Blues Duo featuring vocalist Fay Victor and guitarist Anders Nilsson. Best known for their work together in Ms. Victor’s longstanding quartet, the Fay Victor Ensemble, these frequent collaborators have used this project to create the distinctive, stripped down approach to the blues tradition they have shared with audiences around the world for the past three years.
Included here are unconventional versions of the jazz standards “Mood Indigo,” “Blue Monk,” and “Rockin’ Chair,” the traditional spiritual “Joshua Fit The Battle Of Jericho” and early 20th century blues music from Fulton Allen (Blind Boy Fuller), Reverend Gary Davis, Gerald Marks and Buddy Fields, and Lewis Simpkins and Peter Chatman (Memphis Slim). “It’s a nice cross-section of American music rooted in the blues,” Ms. Victor explains, “and we feel these selections, and our approaches to each of them, are a strong illustration of what is honest and true about that idiom.”
She adds, “We set out to show that a blues-based project doesn’t need to sound derivative. I’m a jazz singer and Anders is a metal guitarist and free improviser, yet the blues deeply inform both of our approaches to music. And, we’re both interested in opening things up and taking them in new directions, independent of the other yet responsive at the same time. He’s not laying down any carpets for me to glide over and I’m not trying to turn him into a rhythm machine. Just like in the Fay Victor Ensemble, we aim to create a dialogue as equal musicians and performers.”

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“Fay Victor has a rich, commanding voice that’s matched by a sense of adventure,” writes JazzTimes’ Mike Shanley. Critics also credit her with “delivering the unexpected with beauty, depth and innovation” (Wilbur MacKenzie, AllAboutJazz—New York) and note that “guitarist Anders Nilsson is always up to something interesting” (Tom Hull, Village Voice). Time Out Chicago’s Arief Sless-Kitain adds, “Nilsson plucks spidery figures and dissonant clusters that loom like an overcast sky, fading to reveal Victor’s cunning artistic vision.”
The pair has worked together as The ExPosed Blues Duo since 2007, when they played their first concert at an experimental music festival in Marseille, France. Though the band has expanded its activities in the past year, including regular performances in New York and collaborations with drummer Tim Daisy and cellists Fred Lonberg-Holm and Tomas Ulrich, it began as an occasional side project of the Fay Victor Ensemble, which has released two acclaimed recordings during its five-year history, including last year’s The FreeSong Suite (Greene Avenue Music).
Learn more at www.myspace.com/exposedbluesproject