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Joyce Cooling
One of the Bay Area's premier guitarists and most popular performers for over a decade, Joyce Cooling takes a chameleon-like approach to music. Drawing upon a wide array of influences ranging from famed Brazilian guitarist/singer/
songwriter João Bosco to renowned Texas bluesman Stevie Ray Vaughan, a typical Cooling club and festival hopping week usually includes a combination of jazz, pop, funk and R&B, with a hint of world-beat.
For Playing It Cool, her Heads Up International debut and long awaited first foray into the smooth jazz world, Cooling incorporates elements of her favorite styles into a groove driven, jazz/pop-oriented setting, highlighting both her formidable "guitarisma" as well as her and longtime musical partner Jay Wagner's uncanny ability to craft picture
perfect melodies. "Playing It Cool" and the first radio single, "South Of Market", quickly soared to #1 in the country on both the Gavin and R&R Smooth Jazz charts (single and album) and stayed there for five consecutive weeks. The CD continued its success on national radio with two more hit singles. Joyce has also been nominated for the Gavin Smooth Jazz Artist of the Year and has been named the Jazz Trax Debut Artist of the Year. In addition, she was voted "Best New Artist" (smooth jazz) in the latest Jazziz Readers Poll.
"Anyone who has ever seen me play live knows that I like to play in all sorts of rhythmic contexts, but at the heart of everything is my great love for songwriting," says Cooling. "There is no greater means of expression for me, and as much as I love performing, I feel loosest and most creative when an idea hits and I can see it through. The challenge is always to arrive at a happy medium, composing tunes that are both commercial and musical, pushing myself to be as artistic as possible while still engaging and including the listeners."
"Jay and I have written songs in many styles, but composing the kind of funky pop pieces that are on this project was a particular challenge," she adds. "The harmonies may be less complicated, but I found myself stretching into new areas, using the simpler harmonic and melodic bases to open doors to different rhythmic possibilities. We concentrated on pop song structure, but wanted to make sure to maintain the intensity level of my live performances. Songwriting is really an extension of who I am as both an artist and as a person, and Playing It Cool is a great showcase to combine all of the things I like to do."
Considering the great variety of music her large family surrounded her with back east in the New York City area, Cooling couldn't help but become something of a musical schizophrenic. Devouring it all - jazz, pop, folk, funk, Brazilian, rock and blues - she amassed a record collection featuring everyone from Bill Evans to Jimi Hendrix, from Miles and Wes to João Gilberto.
"My mother's a classical buff, one brother was a hard rocker, a cousin was into funk and pop - that's just the beginning," she says. "It was quite a rich exposure, and I dabbled in keyboards and percussion before moving towards the guitar. Craving harmony and melody and loving the voice-like quality of the strings, I realized that the guitar was it for me. It was such a singable instrument. I thought I might be a percussionist until I heard Wes Montgomery's solo on "If You Could See Me Now". From then on, I knew what I had to do."
While music was always the most natural and passionate part of her life, a career as a musician only took root after she moved to California and began hanging around outside an African drumming class taught by C.K. Ladzekpo, a renowned Ghanaian percussionist. "I was entranced by the polyrhythmic sophistication," she recalls. "I lived for that class! I was doing every kind of part time odd job I could find just to afford to be a musician."
Her introduction to Jay Wagner, keyboardist on San Francisco's Brazilian circuit, gave her the energy her developing chops needed,
and before long, she was playing that circuit herself and working with Wagner on a full time partnership.
Aside from being a top attraction on the festival circuit with performances over the years at such events as the JVC Jazz Festival, Monterey Jazz Festival and the Stanford University Jazz Festival (a tribute concert with Stan Getz). Cooling has become what one journalist called "San Francisco's string queen of choice," developing a reputation as one of the Bay Area's busiest and most popular performers.
"San Francisco is an untraditional place, an artistic and very eclectic city, which perfectly suits my personality both as a person and as a musician," says Cooling. "I love its rich, cutting edge diversity, the people's openmindedness to the kind of eclectic gigs I like to play. It's the perfect place to find one's voice as a performer because it embraces music that is noncommercial as well as experimental. San Francisco and I are made of the same stuff musically as well as in spirit."
While she has been a hometown hero, she has also played in numerous exotic cities throughout the world, including Manila, The Phillippines; Guadulajara, Mexico and Cartagena, Colombia and with such jazz giants as Stan Getz, Joe Henderson, Airto and Charlie Byrd.
Cooling released her first independent album Cameo in 1989, and it received high critical praise and great amounts of regional airplay, including spins on 94.7 The Wave in Los Angeles and Bay Area stations KKSF and KBLX. The Gavin Report, radio's inside track to what's hot, summed it up when they raved, "We're knocked out."
Getting back to the issue of songwriting, Cooling hopes that the release of Playing It Cool will be just the first step towards making her mark as a composer of commercial music which stands the test of time. "That's the whole point to what Jay and I do - striving to create songs which will sound as great twenty years from now as they do today. I look back on pieces we have written over the years and am happy to find a few that really work for me as well as they did the moment we created them. The goal is always to communicate that same kind of warm feeling to the listener, connecting emotionally with songs that are timeless."
Timeless songs, great guitar playing and a funky, positive attitude are just some of the attributes of Joyce Cooling's debut Playing It Cool, a stirring introduction to a major talent for whom conquering the smooth jazz world is only the beginning.
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