Is It Me...?

Ⓟ & © 2017 Resonance Records. 5711 West Adams Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90016-2401. All rights reserved. Unauthorized reproduction is a violation of applicable laws. Made in USA. Resonance Records  is a division of the Rising Jazz Stars Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-pro�t California corporation.

Ability to Swing (T. Dolby) 5:47

You Can’t Just… (P. Gibbons, J. Pearson) 4:06

Sack Full of Dreams (G. McFarland) 5:23

Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams (Barris, Koehler, Moll) 4:14

Wild is the Wind (D. Tiomkin, N. Washington) 5:58

Basin St. Blues (S. Williams) 5:46

Midnight Prayer (P. Gibbons, J. Pearson) 3:44

Is It Me…? (P. Gibbons, J. Pearson) 4:57

Pure Imagination (A. Newley, L. Bricusse) 5:41

Dr. Feelgood (A. Franklin, T. White) 5:08

I Let a Song Go Out of My Heart (D. Ellington) 4:36

Bonus TrackDon’t Be on the Outside (G. Kelly, M. Watts, S. Wyche) 4:27

www.ResonanceRecords.org

Is It Me...?– the title of this recording, has more than one meaning. It’s not just one of the three songs on the CD that Polly and James Pearson wrote. It also asks the question, who is Polly – as an artist. What kind of a singer is she?

As producer of this album and having worked with her for several years, I can tell you that Polly Gibbons is a truly rare artist who is equally at her best in at least three genres: jazz, blues, and gospel, all of which appear on this release. Endlessly creative, she has the vocal tools and attitude to sing anything. From the sensitive ballad Wild is the Wind, to the swinging Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams, to the soulful Aretha Franklin Dr. Feelgood, to the powerful gospel flavored original Midnight Prayer – she brings her huge voice, range, flawless natural intonation, and the best sense of rhythm of any singer I have ever heard.

The great icon, composer Johnny Mandel, has called Polly “a star,” and I could not agree more. Here’s hoping you agree, too …

– George Klabin, Resonance Records

I would like to thank firstly, of course, all the very gifted musicians who played so wonderfully on this album; without you, I’d be oohing and ahhhing alone into a microphone! Tamir Hendelman, Bill Cunli�e, Willie Murrillo, and James Pearson for their masterful arrangements. Huge thanks to Fran Gala for your clever and speedy work and to Elo Carrillo for ALL that you do…and then some! Thanks to Nigel Cooke, Sara Chatterton, Bill Westmoreland, Bruce Bisenz, James Gavin, John Davidson, Zev Feldman, and the unique team at Resonance Records. There are so many people involved in creating a record, from its initial concept to its release. I would be hard pressed to name you all, but you know who you are and I thank you.

Special thanks to Ti�any Goodman, Ina Dittke, Martha Theodos, and Mary Ann Topper… I like cool women!

I am truly grateful to George Klabin, who came into my life like a bolt of lightning, and I’m glad to say has stuck around much longer! Thank you for your encouragement above and beyond this dodgy music industry… your kindness is very inspiring!

My family and dearest friends, undoubted thanks to you. James, thank you deeply for far too many things to name!

- Polly

Is It Me...?

Creating Jazz Legacies

Produced by: George Klabin and Mary Ann Topper • Recording and Mixing: George Klabin and Fran Gala • Mastering: Fran Gala • Front and Back Cover Photos: Nigel Cooke, London. Other Photos: Nigel Cooke, Bill Westmoreland, Bruce Bisenz • Graphic Design: JRocket77 Design • Design Consultant: Mary Ann Topper • Hair and Makeup Artists: Sara Chatterton (London), Bill Westmoreland (NYC), Gino Columbo (LA) • Booking/Management Consultant: Mary Ann Topper/The Jazz Tree. Outside USA: Ina Dittke and Associates, London.

Horn Section Arrangements Ability to Swing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Tamir Hendelman (*)Basin Street Blues . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bill Cunli�e (*)Dr. Feelgood . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Tamir Hendelman (*)I Let a Song Go Out of My Heart . . Willie Murillo (*)Midnight Prayer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . James Pearson (#)(**)Pure Imagination . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Tamir Hendelman (*)You Just Can’t… . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . James Pearson (#)(**)

Horn SolosAbility to Swing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bob SheppardYou Can’t Just… . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Andy Martin, Vinny Dawson, Tom Peterson, Brian ScanlonBasin St. Blues . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Willie Murillo, Bob Sheppard, Tom McChesneyDr. Feelgood . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Willie MurilloI Let a Song Go Out of My Heart . . . . Willie MurilloPure Imagination . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bob Sheppard

Polly Gibbons . . . . . . . vocalsTamir Hendelman. . . piano (*)James Pearson. . . . . . piano (**), quartet tunes arrangementShedrick Mitchell . . . Hammond organ Graham Dechter . . . guitarKevin Axt. . . . . . . . . . . bassRay Brinker . . . . . . . . . drumsWillie Murillo . . . . . . . trumpet Vinny Dawson . . . . . . trumpet Bob McChesney. . . . trombone Andy Martin. . . . . . . . trombone (#)Bob Sheppard. . . . . . . alto sax, tenor sax, clarinet, fluteBrian Scanlon . . . . . . . alto sax, tenor sax, fluteKeith Bishop . . . . . . . . alto sax, tenor sax, clarinet, fluteTom Peterson . . . . . . baritone sax, tenor sax

Personnel

Is It Me...?

Drenched in the Blues; Wrapped in Swing; Glazed with Groove; and Filled with Soul. These are the thoughts that come to me as I listen to and reflect upon the essence of the delicious and unique voice of Polly Gibbons.

Hers is both a powerful and subtle instrument. One that reveals not only an extraordinary vocal and musical range, but a compelling emotional range, as well. It is a voice that captures elements of both Earth and Air, and it pulls us into a very special space—devoid of cliché and a�ectation— where emotional honesty and spontaneity intertwine and resonate. Polly’s voice is like an arrow which takes aim at the hearts and souls of those who hear it. It does not leave one indi�erent or passive. It demands a reaction. It creates and becomes the story for us to interpret.

And the story is just beginning: “…this one is a Star!” I echo that senti-ment from Johnny Mandel after he heard Polly sing, and I am very excited about my fortuitous involvement with the career launch of this remarkable young artist.

– Mary Ann Topper: THE JAZZ TREE

When you play this album, you’ll hear a singer with a raw, lived-in sound, one that echoes many of the great American blues, soul, and jazz vocalists of the past. The delivery is confident and hard-swinging, and it goes to intense places.

Many have wondered how that voice could come out of a young, blonde British woman who exudes sweetness, even innocence. “There’s always this element of surprise from people who haven’t seen her before,” says James Pearson, her musical director and collaborator since she began. “She astounds me, too. She’s unpredictable.”

Since her 2015 American recording debut on Resonance Records, Many Faces of Love, word has spread both in the U.K. and in the States about Polly and her gritty mixture of styles. Her bookings in both countries are on the rise. In 2016, she opened the U.K. tours of George Benson and Gladys Knight. Wrote Mark McKergow in London Jazz News: “Her performance overflowed with personality and with commitment to the material.” To experience Polly’s “soul and passion,” he added, “is a joyous experience.”

This second Resonance release is another chapter in her evolution. The production has grown along with her abilities. Several tracks have a

P O L L Y G I B B O N S

slamming horn section; it works on both R&B and big-band swing. The piano-playing and most of the arranging tasks are shared by James Pearson (who leads the house band at Polly’s home base, Ronnie Scott’s, the grand-father of London jazz clubs) and Tamir Hendelman, the Israeli-born, Los Angeles-based jazz pianist to the stars, including Barbra Streisand. As ever, Polly’s repertoire is emotionally and musically all over the map.

Her self-creation process began in her teens. A farmer’s daughter, Polly is one of seven siblings, and grew up in Framlingham, a small market town in Su�olk, England. Even as a child, Polly was no stranger to the blues. “I’ve got super-loving parents,” she explains, “but I was very bullied at school, and there was quite a lot of illness in my family.”

She was thirteen when she discovered her voice. Soon thereafter, she heard her sister playing a Billie Holiday record. It galvanized her. Polly scrambled to explore every black American musical great she could find: Mahalia Jackson, Aretha Franklin, Marvin Gaye, Nina Simone, Miles Davis, Donna Hathaway, Thelonious Monk. “There’s so much history and complexity and pain and anger and joy in that music,” she says. “There was something in it that made me very excited and touched me.”

Her influences, clearly, are vast. But jazz is at the heart of her style. She shows it in the opening track, a song suggested by the album’s producer and the founder of Resonance Records, George Klabin: The Ability to Swing, from Thomas Dolby’s 1988 album Aliens Ate My Buick. Belting against and in unison with that tight ensemble of horns (arranged by Tamir), Polly turns the song into a life philosophy about going with the flow.

You Can’t Just is one of several originals by Polly and James. The lyric tells of love on the rocks, but James’s chart is a swinger, with catchy hooks and a burning R&B groove. He leaves solo space for guitarist Graham Dechter and for several of the horn players. Explains James: “I like to keep it minimal while the singer is singing, maybe a few little textures and fills. There’s always time for the band to shine.”

The post-bop modern-jazz arranger-composer Gary McFarland died in 1971, when he was 38. One of the gems he left behind is Sack Full of Dreams. The lyric is one of a handful written by Louis M. Savary, PhD, a prolific author of books about spirituality. The song, with its “I have a dream”-like expression of hope, was introduced in 1968 by Grady Tate, then picked up by Donny Hathaway and others. “I’ve loved it for ages,”

P O L L Y G I B B O N S

explains Polly. “These are weird political times we’re living in, highly unjust and complex, with an information overload, and I thought this song was a nice, simple idea.”

This album includes several evocative slices of Americana. Wild Is the Wind has far outlived its source, the eponymous 1957 film about a torrid love triangle on a Nevada ranch. “We went for a very sparse vibe with the arrangement,” says James. “It was inspired by the vastness of America. The Rocky Mountains, the Nevada desert, bleakness.” Polly recorded Basin Street Blues on her first demo, made when she was eighteen. Largely through imagination, she conjures up a vision of the Mississippi River and the “land of dreams” where jazz was born. The arrangement, by the Grammy-winning pianist Bill Cunli�e, spans several ages of jazz, from traditional to ’30s big-band to post-bop to the retro-swing style of Joe Jackson and Brian Setzer.

The Great American Jazz Songbook is well-represented on this album. Duke Ellington’s I Let a Song Go Out of My Heart shows o� the improvisational chops of both Polly and the L.A. studio trumpeter Willie Murillo, who arranged it. Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams was a Depression-era spirit-lifter;

P O L L Y G I B B O N S

P O L L Y G I B B O N SJames and Polly make it a tonic for the present. Polly’s raucous, percussive vocal cuts through the song’s naïveté and turns it into brass-tacks common sense; drummer Ray Brinker provides the shu�e beat. Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley wrote Pure Imagination for the 1971 film Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory. Decades later, a score of jazz and pop stars discovered it. Tamir Hendelman freshens the song up with an airy waltz-time arrange-ment led by flute.

Tamir’s prowess as a jazz pianist shines on another of Polly and James’s originals, Is It Me...?, a breezy reflection on supplanting fear with self- confidence. “It has a di�erent feel musically from the rest of the album,” says Polly. “This song is a gentle, melodic tune with a questioning and insecure sentiment. I like that there isn’t much room to play around in it; its wordi-ness and melody force me to sing it straight.”

Midnight Prayer won her and James first place in the singer-songwriter category of the summer 2014 Indie International Songwriting Contest. The rolling gospel groove, the Hammond organ of Shedrick Mitchell (Whitney Houston’s keyboard player for almost a decade), and Polly’s melismatic wail all bring out the fire in this bluesy cry for love. Lust is the subject of Aretha

Franklin’s Dr. Feelgood (Love Is a Serious Business). It takes guts to cover that Franklin milestone, in which the Queen of Soul sang of sexual ecstasy as though preaching from the pulpit. But Gladys Knight’s audiences more than approved of Polly’s version, which sounds only like Polly.

Don’t Be on the Outside comes from the same team of writers (Mayme Watts and Sidney Wyche) who brought us the Count Basie-Joe Williams classic, “Alright, Okay, You Win.” In James’s and Polly’s hands, it swings just as hard. The song first appeared on the 1955 album Sarah Vaughan in the Land of Hi-Fi; Polly learned it from a recording by the young Shirley Horn. “On first appearance it appears to be a simplistic throwaway little song, but it’s not,” she says. “It’s got a slightly deeper meaning to it, about being yourself.”

What would she like listeners to take away from this album?

“I think it’s got some fun, some joy, some sorrow, some surprises,” she says. “I like to think I can communicate all those aspects of being human.” With Auto-tune and lip-synching now so common in the pop world, the humanity of Polly’s work is something to treasure. Hers is a world of real-time music- making and genuine feeling.

—James Gavin, New York City, 2017

Ability to Swing 5:47

You Can’t Just… 4:06

Sack Full of Dreams 5:23

Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams 4:14

Wild is the Wind 5:58

Basin St. Blues 5:46

Midnight Prayer 3:44

Is It Me…? 4:57

Pure Imagination 5:41

Dr. Feelgood 5:08

I Let a Song Go Out of My Heart 4:36

Bonus Track

Don’t Be on the Outside 4:27