SOUNDTRACK: GINA CHAVEZ-“The Sweet Sound of Your Name,” Tiny Desk Family Hour (March 12, 2019).
These next few shows were recorded at NPR’s SXSW Showcase.
The SXSW Music Festival is pleased to announce the first-ever Tiny Desk Family Hour showcase, an evening of music by artists who have played NPR Music’s Tiny Desk Concert, at Central Presbyterian Church on Tuesday, March 12 from 8-11pm.
NPR’s Felix Contreras writes:
Years ago, Chavez was a SXSW discovery: I’d tracked her down at some unofficial showcase and was immediately mesmerized by the Austin singer-songwriter. Since then, many good things have come her way, and she’s developed into a major artist. On this Tiny Desk Family Hour video…Chavez’s voice floated into the sacred space during “The Sweet Sound of Your Name,” a 2014 song about another kind of devotion. She’d just performed a deeply emotional pair of songs, barely holding her emotions in check. And like the eight other acts to perform in this special lineup, she tapped into the communal intimacy of the setting, finding magic along the way.
Gina played a Tiny Desk Concert a few years ago and I really liked her. She had power and passion and a wonderful voice. She also sang in English and Spanish which was pretty cool.
This song is a delicate gentle jazzy song. And while her voice is lovely and it’s appropriate for the setting, it just feels like a bit of letdown from what else I know by her.
The song is quite nice, bit it feels too much like lite jazz. Gina is on her guitar and sings a very delicate verse with lovely backing vocals. There’s a sweet Spanish line and then after the first verse the jazzy music kicks in–jazzy drums, and jazzy keyboard stabs–delicate and soft. A jazzy trumpet solo comes in the middle.
There’s no question that she has a lovely voice, but this song, pretty as it may be, just doesn’t excite me that much. It may be a situation of having just enough information to wish it was something else.
Although reading the blurb from Contreras makes it more apparent why she seems so wracked by the end.
And I’m sure seeing it in person was much more dramatic.
[READ: March 21, 2019] Monsters Beware
I had really enjoyed the first two books in this series but for some reason I was hesitant to jump into this one. It may be because the titles are so similar it’s hard to know how the books can be any different. I needn’t have worried as this book was just as good–if not a lot weirder–than the first two.
In the second book, Claudette talked of a great sword called Breaker (which they eventually found). We also saw the evil wizard Grombach get locked in amber forever.
This story uses those two aspects of the previous stories but adds a new twist–a young warrior competition!
Claudette is super excited about it–but the king says there is no way he will let her participate. Worse yet (well, not for her exactly), her brother Gaston has had his magical gelato stall shut down (no magic is allowed during the competition) and after the competition, her best friend Marie (the king and queen’s daughter) is being sent away to finishing school. (more…)
