Kate Schutt

Guitar / Swing / Contemporary Jazz / Indie
Cambridge, MA

the canary in the coalmine!

LATEST NEWS:  "Two Halves of a Broken Heart," a song from Kate's new album has been nominated for a 2007 Independent Music Award in the Jazz category.

TO LISTEN AND VOTE GO TO:

http://www.musiciansatlas.com/pages/IMAFinalist/

BIO / NEW RELEASE INFO:

Kate Schutt
No Love Lost
Official release May 2007
Schutt’s debut appearance with a full gypsy jazz band
Original jazz/pop songs (à la Norah Jones, Cassandra Wilson, Diana Krall)
Please note: Schutt is said “shut”

Soon after moving from the US to Canada in 2005, at a tiny show in Montreal, Kate heard Duane Andrews, a virtuoso gypsy jazz guitarist from Carbonear, Newfoundland, trading solos with Patrick Boyle of Mount Pearl, today Newfoundland’s foremost trumpeter.  With ease, these two produced a detailed and sweeping sound of rhythmic flayed guitar, fast picking and muted trumpet musings.  Kate heard enough.  Shortly thereafter, she invited them to Guelph, Ontario (just outside of Toronto), and the recording of No Love Lost began.  

In No Love Lost, Schutt presents songs with persuasive melodies and lyrics that are, without exception, poetic and on-point.  These songs are like jazz standards, though they are more intimate than songs written for the Broadway stage.  The production is knowing and rich, with gypsy jazz rhythms, sass, and grit—reinforcing all this are subtle drums, strings, piano, harmonica by Toronto bluesman Paul Reddick, and breathtaking back-up vocals by Boston blues legend Toni Lynn Washington.  You’ll also hear Schutt playing the 8-string, a guitar-bass instrument (made legit by jazz guru Charlie Hunter).  This is her first recording as adept, and at times inspired, on this instrument.

The theme of love reigns in No Love Lost.  But love, for Schutt, is never a simple affair.  The album is an anatomy of love that does justice to the heavy and slippery nature of the word.  In the elegy “Mary,” the album’s most stirring piece, Schutt writes of love for a departed nurse and caregiver.  In “Calamity,” she writes of a bystander’s complicated love for an infamous fallen woman.  In two songs that may prove to be jazz standards, “How Much in Love” and “Two Halves,” Schutt writes of carefree love turned wholly careless.  She also pins down unrequited love (“Peter Please”), old love (“The Moon Got Broken”), new love (“The Young”), and even true love (“I’m Yours”).  Of course, an anatomy of love would be incomplete without a nod to rushed love and vanity—Schutt covers this with a daring and sensual interpretation of Sheila E.’s “Glamorous Life.”

Schutt’s previous albums, marked by a minimalist aesthetic, were all recorded solo and strictly live on tour across the US.  This, her debut studio album, is a new beginning, no doubt inspired by her move to a new country and to a booming new music scene.