ALBUM DESCRIPTION: In her album Solitude, Luce Black brings a fresh approach to jazz standards. Her unique style brings a twist of exotic Latin and French influences to some of her swing tunes and ballads. Luce’s renditions are infused with personality through an intriguing blend of tenderness and edginess in her sound, strongly supported by an all professional rhythm section. The arrangements are brilliantly orchestrated and sure to please listeners. ARTIST'S BIOGRAPHY: Luce Forté Black was born in Montréal to a French Canadian family. Her mother and sister were both musicians and classical vocalists, and Luce started classical piano lessons at the age of four. Through the years, she participated in festivals and music contests and won several prizes. At 16, she won a piano scholarship to the Conservatory of Music in Montréal where she studied for two years before pursuing a business degree in college. She set music aside for the next few years while she completed her degree and started working. In 1991, Luce moved to Salt Lake City, Utah. Luce built a successful marketing consulting business which included French voiceovers on and off camera, but she wanted to get back to her musical activities. In 1998, she bought a grand piano and started building a new repertoire. She took engagements at various receptions and played as a guest artist at the Pioneer Theatre Company in Salt Lake City. However, Luce’s ultimate musical ambition was to sing. She started classical voice lessons but her progress was slow and tortuous. She tried six different voice teachers over a number of years and all were unsuccessful in bringing Luce’s voice to life. One teacher even told her that she was wasting her time trying to sing, but Luce knew she had it in her and was determined to find the teacher that would help her make it happen. She felt that although she loved playing classical piano, classical voice was not a good fit for her bubbly personality; jazz was much more exciting. This was a daring transition for her; both her parents were faithful classical music enthusiasts and somewhat unsupportive of many other music and vocal styles. In the fall of 2004, she found the teacher she’d been looking for and started jazz vocal lessons with Kelly Eisenhour, a recording jazz vocalist currently on the top chart. It was a perfect match. Luce knew little about jazz other than the fact that she loved it, but she was a fast learner and a hard worker. Meanwhile, Luce was preparing to make a piano recording that would become her first music album. Now that she had found a good voice teacher, she challenged herself to learn lyrics to four new songs (every song was a new song to her at that point) and add them to her piano album. She recorded her vocals in February 2005 and was scheduled to record her piano a week later, but a few days before the scheduled piano recording, she fell ill with severe bronchitis and recorded with a fever. “I had to record that evening and I felt so weak that I spent most of the day in bed to save my energy…the show must go on, you know. I was just grateful that I had recorded my vocals before getting sick. Little did I know then how long it would take before I could sing again.” Luce’s illness got worse and caused a violent cough that persisted for weeks and injured her vocal cords. She could hardly talk anymore. She went to the University of Utah’s Laryngology/Voice University Medical Center and consulted with a physician and a speech language pathologist. She needed complete vocal rest and stopped talking for 3 weeks (not even a whisper! Not a small feat if you know Luce) during which time she carried a pad of paper at all times and used her dog’s squeaker toy to talk on the phone (one squeak for yes, two for no). Luce recalls: “It was a pretty strange experience. I would write down what I wanted to say on my pad of paper so that I could still communicate, but people reacted in all sorts of ways. Some ignored me or were flat out rude; others were kind, caring and patient. I finally figured out that if I put a name to my condition, people were more comfortable. I made a tag that I wore around my neck at all times that said ‘laryngitis’. It wasn’t completely true, but people understood that better than if I’d written ’vocal cord injury’. I never felt as isolated as during those three weeks. Needless to say it was a very frustrating time.” Six months went by before Luce was able to start singing again in September 2005. This was devastating news because she had planned on spending Spring and Summer preparing Solitude, a jazz vocals recording that would become her second album. The illness had taken away precious preparation time and she was on a schedule. Indeed, Luce had decided a while back on a change of career that would help her make a more personal impact on people’s lives and decided to embrace the profession of medicine. She started her graduate degree at the University of Utah School of Medicine in the Physician Assistant Program in May 2006. Once in school, she knew her time would be limited: her recording had to be completed before. She worked several hours most days to prepare. She listened to dozens of songs before carefully selecting fourteen, none of which she had sung before, putting thought and work into the vocal arrangements. “When I first decided on this project, I didn’t realize the magnitude of the task ahead. I spent time thinking about the vocal arrangements and the general feel I wanted to create with the band arrangements. Many times I’d tell Kelly, my voice teacher, a new idea I had about how to sing a certain song or passage, or licks I had in mind, many of them quite ambitious for my level. I had all these ideas, but vocally, I wasn’t technically ready, so I had to work really hard to get there. Kelly must have been a bit skeptical at times but she never kept me from daring to try. Always, she encouraged me and gave me the tools to make ideas come to life, and with her skillful direction and my hard work, I progressed really fast.” Luce hired Steve Keen, a professional pianist, accordionist and arranger, to develop the band arrangements, most of which she arranged with him. “Steve was awesome to work with. I’d go to his studio and tell him my vision, brings parts of arrangement ideas,the feel I had in mind, sing melodies for variations, and some ideas for the different rythm section parts. I described to him images I had in my mind of scenes that the songs elicited. Steve was the best person to help me make those images come to life in music. No matter how clear or unclear, Steve always captured my vision and enhanced it with his amazing chord progressions. We had a lot of fun sharing ideas and coming up with great stuff. We worked in synergy and built from each other's ideas back and forth. To top it off, he loves the accordion and so do I… the accordion is so French that it feels like home to me. And Steve loves French songs. It was great to incorporate a French flavor to some of my songs.” Luce graduated from PA school and became a certified Physician Assistant in October 2008 and is working in Salt Lake City, Utah. Through the hardship of school and clinical rotations, she had to slow the pace of her vocal endeavour but she never completely stopped. She claims that along with working out, it’s the thing that kept her sane while studying medicine. "I'm now ready to resume a normal life and pursue my musical activities and work on new songs and arrangements. I'm thinking of doing more French number." To e-mail Luce: luceislight@yahoo.com