Photo: Melanie Charles | © Joyce Jones/ Suga Bowl Photography. Some Rights Reserved. Creative Commons CC-NC-BY-ND. Used with Permission.
Program note: we’re in a new weekly Tuesday night slot from 10-12 midnight!
The next show will air on Tuesday March 19, 2019 from 10:00 PM – 12 Midnight Eastern Standard Time on WBAI, 99.5 FM in the NYC metro area or streaming online at wbai.org. This broadcast features an interview with flutist and vocalist, who uses Roland SPs and loop pedals, Melanie Charles. We discuss a Charles’ development, inspiration and varying projects.
Melanie Charles is a Brooklyn-born singer-songwriter, actress, and flutist of Haitian descent, with a creative fluidity spanning jazz, soul, experimental, and Haitian roots music. Charles latest release “The Girl with the Green shoes” established Charles as a progressive voice in Jazz that has caught attention.
Charles’ latest venture, Make Jazz Trill Again, traces the journey of Black music from the Haitian folk songs to Negro spirituals, from the Blues to Nancy Wilson and Hugh Masekela. Charles creates a space where tradition meets present time, using Roland SPs, loop pedals, and the flute to blur the lines between and among social classes, cultures, genders, and theories to create a world where opposing elements can co-exist.
Charles graduated from the New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music with a BFA in vocal jazz performance and trained under the tutelage of jazz masters Reggie Workman, Charles Tolliver, Junior Mance, Janet Lawson, Carla Cook, and Billy Harper.
[(Bio adapted from Charles’s website)
This program is hosted, engineered, produced, and edited by Joyce Jones. Listen for our On the Bandstand segment with NYC metro area appearances of Suga’ guests at the end of the first hour with Associate Producer Hank Williams.
Web Extras:
Watch the video for Charles’s “Pat Yo’ Afro”
Hank Williams is assistant producer for Suga’ in My Bowl and produces the weekly “On the Bandstand” segment as well as running the show’s website and blog, where he has reviewed several jazz festivals. His writing has also appeared in Left Turn magazine and American Music Review. He teaches at Lehman College in the City University of New York system.
Suga' in My Bowl 
Discussion
Comments are closed.