Do you call it Jazz, Art-rock, Fusion, Cabaret, Opera?  American singer, keyboardist and composer Emily Bezar has been inventing and recording her uncategorizable music for over thirty years. Her intricate songs are rich with classical, jazz and electronic elements but they flirt with pop structures and burn with the intensity of rock. They are honest and true, full of passion, elegance, conflict and order.

 

She has sung Mozart and Debussy, Weill and Schubert, Gershwin and Sondheim, but she’s most at home in the sound world she creates around her own voice....some alchemic combination of all the music she has heard and loved throughout her life.

 

On her new double album Vista, Emily presents her musical reflections on two intense and transformative periods of her life, separated by twenty years.  Part I: Radial Mind is her musical and lyrical account of her anxious isolation during the pandemic. Part II: Secteur, her first long-form instrumental piece, is a seven part electronic tone-poem, her sonic memory of the episode of psychotic mania that led to her hospitalization in southern France in 2003.

 

To accompany the release of Vista, she has written a mini-memoir to set the scene for Secteur. She is also publishing here, on her website, a small portfolio of artwork that she created while she was hospitalized in France. 

 

On Part I: Radial Mind, Emily is joined by Brian Mesko on bass and guitar and Jason Hoffheins on drums, two of Virginia and Pennsylvania's most esteemed musicians, who sculpt her ideas in time with fluidity and precision.  Mix engineer Joe Costa (Ben Folds, Amanda Palmer) beautifully highlights both the grace and the power within Emily's unpredictable songs.  Mesko and Costa also collaborated with Emily on her 2019 release, Out of the Moment.

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Raised in southern California, Emily played classical piano as a child, but spent her beachy summers soaked in sounds ranging from Earth Wind and Fire to Streisand, Ella Fitzgerald to Pink Floyd, Blondie and the Clash. In her teens she discovered Joni Mitchell's jazz period albums, Tangerine Dream, Weather Report and the songs of Debussy and Ravel.

 

She entered the Oberlin Conservatory as an aspiring opera singer but was soon lost to the lure of the subterranean electronic music studios. Back in California after Oberlin, she continued her explorations in electronic music at Stanford University's CCRMA.​

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She lived for over two decades in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she released six solo albums and one solo EP, and an EP and a live album with acclaimed San Francisco band The Potato Eaters.  Since 2017 she has lived in the Blue Ridge mountains of southwest Virginia.​​​​​​