REVIEWS

PUREMUSIC.COM, OCT 2005
by Michael Ross

"Emily Bezar has never been interested in making average pop records; one of the hallmarks of her greatness has always been a sense of ambition--something lacking in much of the "comfort-food-for-the-post-9/11-crowd" music that pervades the airwaves."
read full review

PROGRESSION MAGAZINE, SUMMER 2005
by Diana Green

Emily Bezar's fourth album," Angels' Abacus," owes a tremendous debt to Kate Bush, Jane Siberry, and Joni Mitchell, though the latter is more ideological than musical. Like Mitchell, Bezar is a very self-sufficient creator and player, covering duties from voice, piano, string arrangements and drum programming to producing the entire album (with assistance from Tim Pettit on a mere three of 16 tracks.) Bezar's stylistic debt to Siberry and Bush is too easy. Like all these women, Emily Bezar is an original, and deserves to be regarded as such.

Bezar's compositional voice owes as much to Keith Jarrett and Peter Gabriel as to Carla Bley. As incongruous as that seems, Bezar's compositions are confident, adventurous, and heartfelt. Beginning with the line "Beneath the linen and the lidocaine," "In My Sky" is an emotional tour de force anchored by Jon Evans' subtle bass lines and Dan Foltz' understated drumming.

This is mature, intelligent, beautiful music, deserving of a place in the music library of anyone with a mind and a soul.

THE HAIRLESS HEART HERALD, MAY 2005
by Jem Jedrzejewski

PROGGNOSIS.COM APRIL 2005
by Marc Roy

EXPOSE MAGAZINE, MARCH 2005
by jon davis

Back in Exposé #20 I gushed about Emily Bezar's first three albums, and honestly the only negative I can come up with for her new release is the fact that it took so long to arrive. The changes from 1999's "Four Walls Bending" are incremental rather than fundamental, but why mess with such a good thing? The two basic ingredients of the music are her powerful voice and piano, and all the embellishments serve as seasonings to those. She has the good sense not to ignore her years of voice training, the good taste to make that impressive technique subservient to her musical vision, and the courage to use her crisp enunciation and warm vibrato regardless of contemporary trends. There is a bit less of her classical-meets-jazz piano here, due to the frequent denseness of the arrangements; there are still moments reserved for piano and voice alone, or nearly alone, as intriguing electronic sounds creep into the interstices of every track. On a few tracks, the electronics condense into rhythmic loops, but this is no knuckling-under to modern fashion - the music is above all uncompromising, relentlessly following an educated, capricious muse to such lengths that Bezar is a genre unto herself. In lesser hands, all this would come off as pretentious, but every note is filled with such honesty that you can't question her motives. She is not showing off, she is manifesting the music in her head, and it's a thing of beauty.

jazzreview.com 3/2005
by richard bourcier

Progwereld.com 1/2005
by ton veldhuis (in dutch)

Collected Sounds, 12/2004
by Anna Maria Stjärnell

prognaut.com, 12/2004
by ron fuchs

Ragazzi-Music.de, 11/2004
by Volkmar Mantei (in German)

Clouds and Clocks.net, 11/2004
by BEPPE COLLI

Downbeat Magazine, October 2000
by Jon Andrews

FOUR STARS * * * *
Classically trained on keyboards and voice, Bezar creates textured, haunting art-rock. Her extended vocal range and dramatic delivery should instantly appeal to devotees of Kate Bush and Jane Siberry. Bezar's third self-released disc beautifully synthesizes elements of new music, jazz and pop. She favors intricate, cyclical figures on synthesizers, but her piano solos project a distinctly jazzy perspective. Morris Acevedo's wailing guitar serves as a complementary voice. Thoughtfully composed songs, such as "Velvet Eye" and "Lead," hook the listener with urgent vocals, oblique lyrics and passages of exhilarating release.

I read a review of Moon in Grenadine some time ago which described it as what you might get if Sarah McLachlan's band indulged itself in a King Crimson fetish, so of course I had to have it. While that description has some truth to it (for some of the songs at least), there's a lot more to Emily Bezar than that. The Sarah McLachlan part comes from the intimacy of her vocal style, though Emily obviously has classical training and can project in a way Sarah never could. The King Crimson part comes from the jagged-but-fluid guitar riffs featured on a number of the songs (“40 Mansions” and “Gingerbread”). Other elements include a pronounced jazzy side and a harmonic variety akin to modern classical music. Several of the tunes feature sax and trumpet and a swing rhythm reminiscent of the cool era (“Dream Gasoline”). Other songs reduce the mix down to piano and voice, and while Emily's playing is more restrained than Tori Amos (and her lyrics more decipherable), the comparison is quite apt. I was hooked, and looked forward to discovering her first album.

Emily Bezar's first album is a decidedly intimate affair. She performs mainly on the piano, supplementing the sound with various samples and “sound design” for a lush audio landscape. A string quartet joins her from time to time, but it is her distinctive voice and piano playing that set the stage. She has a strong background in musical academia, and the study shows in her technique, from her precise vibrato singing and enunciation to her accomplished piano playing to her sophisticated compositions. The most apparent references are 20th Century composers like Bartok and Hovhaness; female artists like Kate Bush, Tori Amos, and Jane Siberry; and ambient pioneers like Brian Eno. There's even a jazzy lilt to her piano parts at times, though this aspect of her music would not be exploited fuller until the second album.

Progression Magazine, Winter/Spring 2000
by John Collinge

Remember that old '50s sci-fi yarn, Mars Needs Women? Well, progressive music needs more women (as we all know ) - women like Emily Bezar. Comparisons ultimately will be made between Bezar and the likes of Kate Bush, but this gifted vocalist/lyricist from the San Francisco Bay Area is up to the task. Bezar's lilting voice hails from the upper registers in a reflective, slow- to mid-tempo fashion that rivets attention on her starkly impressionistic tone poems. Odd phrasings and an apparent fondness for the avant-garde throw engaging quirkiness into this theatrical brew, with instrumental assistance by Bezar on keyboards and piano plus three fellows on guitar, bass and drums. Neo-classical/jazz leanings color Four Walls Bending, along with the apparent progressive touches. Yet, the instrumental work is mere accompaniment to Bezar's vocal musings and never takes precedence. It's quite fun to read the lyrics while listening to the album, as Bezar's unusual style causes your eye to skip across her words like a skittering waterbug. "Kingdom Come" is a good case in point. An elegant, eloquent album ideal for late nights and rainy Sundays.

The Wire, March 2000
by Tom Ridge

This leftfield singer-songwriter from the San Francisco Bay Area combines intricate musical arrangements with swooping, virtuoso vocal performances. The effect is a bit like encountering Kate Bush jamming with King Crimson. That is, her restlessly kinetic songs are burdened with flashy solos. When Bezar ditches the florid musicianship, as on the ballad "Maybe So" and the more sedate "Filigree of Noon", her talent shines more clearly.

San Francisco Bay Guardian, November 3-9, 1999
by Sylvia W. Chan

Comparisons between Emily Bezar and Kate Bush have been made -- both have wieldy, netherworldly sopranos that soar and plummet against whirling, constantly shifting avant-pop charts. Bezar, however, has finely tuned, neoclassical jazz sensibilities akin to those of Keith Jarrett. Her tunes are filled with hollow fifths and aching, arching sevenths, as well as lush, delicious chords that wash up from time to time to illuminate her ethereal yet substantive vocals. The effects of this are especially lovely on the title track and on the poignant "His Everything," which tenderly portrays a mother gazing with wonder upon her child. On this release Bezar assumes keyboard and programming duties, while musicians Morris Acevedo (guitar), Andrew Higgins (bass), and Steve Rossi (drums) navigate her intricate compositions with fluidity and grace.

East Bay Express, October 15, 1999
by Sam Hurwitt

...Bezar's [tunes] inhabit the lush and ethereal territory patrolled by Kate Bush and Tori Amos' hounds and huntsmen. That's a superficial comparison -- the prominent piano and the breathy warbling are enough to suggest it but Bezar's new disc Four Walls Bending is full of crisp babbling-brook piano and synth-laden atmospheric psychedelia chilled by her wintery soprano. Still, you don't have to strain your ears to hear the strong jazz and prog rock monsters lurking beneath her shimmery pool of delicate melodies.

East Bay Express, November 1996
by Larry Kelp

Once in the art-cult band the Potato Eaters, Berkeley singer Bezar produced, wrote, and arranged more than an hour-long pop-jazz-classical song cycle with cryptic lyrics on love and marriage for her second solo album. The music ranges from the hard-rocking "40 Mansions" through the sensuously soft samba, "Mosquito in the Shade." She uses a band at times, even horns (Grassy Knoll trumpeter Chris Grady and Splatter Trio saxophonist Dave Barrett). But the best moments come when it's just Bezar's piano and marvelously expressive soprano-alto voice (think Kate Bush, Dawn Upshaw, and what Tori Amos aspires to): just when she gets almost too quietly intimate, Bezar grasps a feeling in the words and soars with it to exhilarating heights. She doesn't believe in hooks; catchy melodic lines are never repeated. But Bezar offers a rarer reward: an album that puts the listener into a luxurious world of pure sonic beauty.

Keyboard Magazine, February 1997
by Jim Aikin

When Bezar is all alone with her piano and lost in a soaring, heartfelt vocal line, you could mistake her for Tori Amos. The lyrics are as poetic, but they're more oblique than confessional, and her voice has more vibrato. Once in a while the band shifts into a higher gear: Bezar swings into a McCoy-influenced jazz piano solo in "Dream Gasoline," and by the out chorus a fuzz guitar has joined the fray. The angular riffs in "Gingerbread" threaten to tip over into dissonance, and Bezar adds to the tension by multitracking several independent vocal lines. But even the power tracks often pull back in the middle and turn into ballads. Art rock is alive and well in Berkeley.

Stereophile Magazine, February 1997:
Records To Die For 1997
Richard Lehnert

"Not for everyone," I cautioned in my review of Bezar's daunting debut CD (May '94). But Moon in Grenadine's textures are a bit less dense than Grandmother's Tea Leaves' brilliantly deployed keyboards, string quartets, and avant-garde electronics, and Bezar has a band now - really a jazz quartet. Her voice veers from childlike intimacy to womanful operatic cry, and her piano chops are awesome (she's conservatory-trained in both). Songs never go where you think they will ("Rain in Calgary"), and her lyrics make up in hothouse imagery what they lack in straightforwardness. Think Amos or Bush backed by Zappa ("Gingerbread") and you'll be right, if not nearly right enough. Bezar's intelligence is overwhelming - there's enough richness, rigor, allusion, and surprise here to keep you thinking till next year. A bit of digital harshness, but otherwise Moon in Grenadine sounds far better than Tea Leaves - which missed being Recording of the Month by just that much.

Stereophile Magazine, May 1994
by Richard Lehnert

Those of you up to musical challenges a few giant steps past Tori Amos and Kate Bush, try this. Emily Bezar's Oberlin studies, building on her piano background, were in vocal and electronic music, after which she sang jazz in Europe. She's since given recitals of Webern lieder, performs regularly in Stanford U.'s computer-music concert series, wrote and performed a musical-theater piece, and did a stint with San Francisco rock band The Potato Eaters. She also wrote, sang, produced, engineered and plays virtually all the instruments (ie, many keyboards)- except for the arrangement she wrote for the Arlekin String Quartet-on her rather daunting debut album, Grandmother's Tea Leaves.

So it says on her bio, and you'd be forgiven for thinking, "Sounds pretentious-just another conservatory dilettante dressed all in black with arty hair, playing boring neominimalist music on her Chromachord synthesizer and thing she's the Biggest Alternative Thing since Laurie Anderson."

Emily Bezar just might be the Biggest Alternative Thing since Laurie Anderson, especially as she's one thing Anderson never claimed to be- a musician-and another that her flack sheet doesn't mention: a hell of a poet. Bezar's music is deeply rooted in contemporary classical music and state-of-the-art electronic realizations, and she's brave enough to use her classically disciplined soprano as it was trained to be used. And although I find her vibrato a bit too songbird-taut, and her diction impossible, not one of the 215 bones in this woman's body is unmusical.

I've been listening to Grandmother's Tea Leaves for weeks now, and I've never heard anything like it. Imagine the free-ranging tonalities and rhythmic density of some of Keith Jarrett's least lyrical solo-piano improvisations (say, from Sun Bear Concerts, Staircase, or Vienna Concert) married to the sophistication of Tod Dockstader's uncompromising electronic compositions and the lyricism of Ryuichi Sakamoto, these in turn merely providing the settings for wholly contemporary verse of the rigor, richness, and allusiveness of a Marilyn Hacker or the pre-Ariel Sylvia Plath. Here's just one example of her verbal richness, from one of the more accessible compositions, "Just Like Orestes": "Just like Orestes, with his naked knife suspended/Just like Cassandra, with her tongue too thick to bleed/I unveil you, standing so young beside it-/I will be there waiting for you at the guillotine."

But what keeps me coming back again and again is the music: a surprise in every bar, strange piano figures turning down hitherto hidden harmonic hallways that open in turn onto patently impossible vistas drawn in the forced perspectives of polytonality- an M.C. Escher in sound. This is music of relentless seriousness and archly Olympian wit, in which no pretense is made to anything but artifice. (Bezar's accomplishments force me to retreat into the oxymoronic.)

I'll let Bezar describe her art in words from the title song, in which she seems to anticipate her critics: "I've been accused of excess,/ been haunted and morose, but the canvas/in my corner just won't bear a smaller dose/ Some say we are suffering/ from a lyrical disease,/ but when we turn our backs around,/ they're sobbing on their knees." And, from "I Tear Down": "When life becomes art, the imitation's clear/ oh darling, your interior is getting far too near/ so all alone, once again, I pass you to your years,/ tear you down."

Emily Bezar has forged her life into creations of total artifice wholly devoid of the pretentious-although she'll be accused of being just that. In such aesthetic distance her heart's interior is intimately revealed as a series of mirrored chambers of glass and ice, night and fog, all in music of a tart purity rare in pop- something which Grandmother's Tea Leaves every so often, and ever so remotely, resembles. I'd name it Recording of the Month; however, not only is the sound dry and artificial (except for the vocals), but to say that this record is Not For Everyone is the understatement of the year. Still, it hasn't left my CD player since it arrived. There's enough importance here to keep the serious, open-eared listener busy for years; more to the point, it's encrypted with enough grace to keep that listener happy for the duration. But if you believe that when rock gets serious, it gets dead, then stay away.

Keyboard Magazine, July 1994
by Robert Doerschuk

For fans who mourn Kate Bush's surrender to commercialism, Emily Bezar offers musical relief. Her debut album draws from varied song traditions, from art-pop to Webern. No brainless hooks puncture Bezar's songs; instead, she runs intricate themes through variations designed for something more serious than casual listening. "La Place Dauphine" exemplifies her approach: Cabaret references, enhanced by the breath-like rubato of Bezar's self-accompaniment on piano, support an extended melody that suggests Kurt Weill but occasionally flirts with dodecaphony. Electronic touches underscore myriad details, illuminating but never diverting attention from the pianistic heart of the song. On electronic pieces, several of which were recorded at Stanford University's CCRMA music lab, or works such as the eleven-minute "Just Like Orestes," Bezar blends diverse electro-acoustical elements to orchestrate complex passagework. This is difficult, dense stuff: From polytonal piano and voice episodes through murky synthesized textures riddled with industrial noises, Bezar brooks no compromise in her art. There are artists of talent, and artists of integrity: Those, like Bezar, who possess both qualities are a rare and valuable commodity.

The Wire: Adventures in Modern Music, March 1995
by Chris Blackford

American Emily Bezar is a singer/composer of many talents. Conservatory educated in singing and electronic music, her vocal performances have encompassed Mozart, Debussy, Weill, Gershwin, Webern, even jazz. She's also a formidable electroacoustic composer, a former member of a rock group, The Potato Eaters, and an improvisor in the San Francisco Bay Area. Grandmother's Tea Leaves, her debut CD, hints at some of these personalities and genres, though essentially escapes easy classification, with eight self-penned songs, a short opening instrumental and a fine concluding vocal/electroacoustic composition which enters avant garde territory. Her decorous melodies-intriguing electronic flourishes over a piano accompaniment-are as discreetly perfumed as Earl Grey tea, entirely free from mawkish sentimentality. Vocally there are echoes of Joni Mitchell and Kate Bush, but Bezar's clarity of tone and thrilling leaps across the range are executed with the sort of precision that only a classically trained soprano could achieve. This is a remarkably mature debut where classical and pop influences merge beautifully.

Rubberneck 17, Summer 1995
by Giuseppe Colli

Liking songs has gotten a bit risky these days: we mostly get stock chord progressions, inane lyrics, singalong choruses, bicycle pump vocalists. Then, of course, there'se rap. Nostalgia, anyone?

Fortunately, we also have Emily Bezar's debut CD: a fine, rare example of a fascinating, captivating, mature musical vision; ten songs/instrumentals she has written, produced and partially engineered. It's easy, at first, to overstate her influences; that voice, that piano reminded this listener of the naked honesty of Joni Mitchell's Blue; but the intricate fabric of her melodies, the electronic splashes of colour, the fluid multi-layered contrapuntal quality of her arrangements show Emily Bezar to be her own woman, and an artist of today.

It's mostly a solo affair (the main exception being the fine string quartet of the title-track) but boredom is banished. Her compositional/poetic skills offer depth and variety; the 11-minute long "Just Like Orestes" never falters under the weight of its ambitions. The short tracks are gems. Bizarre? Not at all. Original? Definitely. Wouldn't it be nice to have fine songs on the radio for a change?

San Francisco Bay Guardian, December 1993
by Larry Kelp

Operatic soprano and composer Bezar's intriguing debut solo album (after her role in the art-rock Potato Eaters) disregards known musical categories as she merges contemporary "classical" music with pop, into something that approaches 90's art song. Her compositions unfold at their own pace with no definite rhythm patterns and rarely any repeating form either, as if the beauty of sound for its own sake is enough. Her voice, over thick keyboard orchestrations, is reminiscent of Kate Bush's in both sound and emotional impact. It may not be catchy, but it's gorgeous.

BAM Magazine, December 1993
by Steve Stolder

Potato Eaters vocalist Emily Bezar unveils a truly unique solo side with this collection of 10 original art songs. Bezar garnishes her sagacious soprano and darkly romantic lyrics ("Oh like the lover gently dented in your room/I'm shivering like an addict resurfacing too soon") with her own piano and electronic "sound design," plus austere accompaniment from guitarist Michael Ross and the Arlekin String Quartet. In addition to offbeat rock, Bezar has sung Debussy and Mozart, and this CD definitely comes from a European tradition, which, at the very least, makes it distinctive. Bezar's talent and meticulousness make Grandmother's Tea Leaves much more than just unusual.