Katerina Brown Biography
On one level, Mirror offers an impressive introduction to a capaciously gifted singer. But Katerina Brown’s debut album isn’t so much a career statement as a progress report from an artist who is used to wrenching Russia, and fairly recently arrived in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is still very much between worlds, and her music draws from her past while opening up new avenues for future exploration. The project displays her gorgeous sound and stylistic range as she continues her creative journey.
“It’s a jazz CD, but it has different styles,” Brown says. “Bossa nova, American Songbook standards, Russian tunes, an original. I want to show people that I’m still searching. Standards helped me find myself but that’s not what defines me. I want to combine all the styles in my singing. I want to explore more.”
Brown’s roots frame the album, which opens and closes with beloved songs that are instantly recognizable to Russian audiences. “The Gate” is a sweepingly romantic piece from the end of the 19th century. The title track of a more recent vintage by Yury Saulsky and Nikolai Denisov, sophisticated songwriters from the early 1970s. Brown learned the piece from her jazz vocal teacher in St. Petersburg, who spent two weeks in jail for singing the piece around the time it was written. She closes with “It’s Snowing,” a very popular Russian song rendered with enough searing heat that the arrangement could change the weather forecast. Brown includes English language versions of the songs translated from the Russian as bonus tracks at the end.
In many ways the Russian repertoire is a key component of her transplanted identity. “When I came here I thought to be a Russian jazz singer singing all American songs, that’s a bit strange,” she says. “I need to bring something from my culture so that American audiences can listen and get familiar with them. We have very great composers, and I always want my Russian audiences not to forget that this music is powerful and beautiful. When I sang ‘The Mirror’ for the first time a lot of musicians came to me and were so happy, saying it’s such a beautiful melody.”
One of the album’s standout tracks is the Gershwins’ “They Can’t Take That Away from Me,” a sparkling duet with Kenny Washington, the Oakland vocalist widely regarded by colleagues like Wynton Marsalis and Joe Locke as the world’s finest male jazz singer. She credits her husband, bassist Gary Brown, with bringing the Dori Caymmi and Alan and Marilyn Bergman standard “Like A Lover” into her repertoire, a piece that features percussionist Celso Alberti and guitarist Ricardo Peixoto, two of the Bay Area’s leading Brazilian musicians. As the longtime accompanist for Airto and Flora Purim and other Brazilian stars, Gary Brown is deeply versed in the Brazilian songbook. “I didn’t know much about Brazilian music when I met him,” Katerina says. “They have wonderful melodies, and Brazilian composers are influenced by classical composers a lot.” Gary Brown was not only the creative force and visionary of this project, he was also the producer of Mirror. “I am truly grateful for all the beautiful work he has done,” says the vocalist.
The album also bridges Brown’s musical worlds when it comes to arrangements. Dina Sineglazova, a close friend and rising pianist in St. Petersburg, created the charts for the bulk of the album’s material. Adam Shulman, who’s become the pianist of choice for storied Bay Area song stylists such as Tiffany Austin, Paula West, and Ed Reed, contributed horn arrangements and accompanies Brown throughout the album.
“I love Adam,” she says. “There’s no one else for me. He’s very tender, and he really listens, which is so important for a singer. He’s very delicate and soft and strong at the same time. With Adam, Gary, and Akira Tana I’m in such good hands.”
Born on July 16, 1982 in a small town outside St. Petersburg, Katerina Brown was drawn to music as an infant. Jazz and American records were still hard to come by in the waning years of the Soviet Union, but she soaked up her father’s albums by Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong. Studying classical music throughout her adolescence, she started performing in local clubs as a teenager, singing mostly blues and standards. (cont.)
Ambitious and eager to learn more, she moved to St. Petersburg at 19 and quickly fell in with a cadre of young musicians who loved and played jazz. With CDs out of reach for students on a budget, they passed around cassettes to turn each other on to new sounds.
A savvy bandleader by 21, she started performing regularly at the Red Lion Blues Club, which was owned by an American. Though the venue closed soon afterwards, the gig established her reputation, and she spent the next five years working steadily around the city as a blues singer. Her next big break came when she joined one of the region’s top acts, touring and recording with the Old Fashioned Blues Band. She spent about six years with the group. “We performed in Moscow and Ukraine and all around Russia, though we never went abroad,” she says. “After a while I started to feel like I wanted more.”
Brown wanted more musical challenges, richer harmonies, and more avenues for improvisation. By 2010 she had left the Old Fashioned Blues Band and enrolled in the Saint-Petersburg State University of Culture and Arts, delving into harmony, theory, and romance. A saxophone player she started dating, Sergey Nagorniy, gave her dozens of albums to listen to, which inspired a deep dive into YouTube. With her background in blues, she was drawn first to Dinah Washington, but before long she was smitten with Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan too. “I loved dark, deep voices,” Brown says. “I wanted to learn how sing like that. I studied Nancy Wilson and Billie Holiday’s phrasing, and among contemporary singers I love Dianne Reeves and Dee Dee Bridgewater. I learned Love and Peace, her Horace Silver CD, by heart.”
The featured vocalist with a jazz orchestra that performed under the auspices of St. Petersburg’s Cultural Centre of General Directorate of Ministry of Internal Affairs, Brown became of the city’s most visible jazz artists. Famous Russian jazz critic Vladimir Feyrtag included her name in his popular jazz encyclopedia, Jazz in Saint-Petersburg: Who Is Who, in 2014.
Her life took another turn in 2013 when she met bassist Gary Brown, who was touring in Russia with renowned Latin jazz pianist Rebeca Mauleón. He stopped by a St. Petersburg jam session where she was performing and was very complimentary about her voice. “I thought he was probably trying to pick me up,” she recalls. “But we stayed in touch and we started to talk on the phone.”
Eager to study jazz directly from the source in the United States, she applied for a visa and took lessons with leading creative figures such as Berklee’s Gabriel Goodman, JD Walter, and Raz Kennedy. During a monthlong stay in New York City she made the rounds, hitting jam sessions and hanging at Small’s and Birdland into the wee hours “like a fairytale, staying up until 4 a.m.,” she says. (Brown currently is studying at Denmark’s Complete Vocal Institute, the largest vocal institute in Europe.)
Invited to San Francisco by Gary Brown, she ended up moving to the Bay Area in 2015. She’s quickly found a rich community, forging close ties to many of the region’s top players and performing at leading venues around the region such as Yoshi’s in Oakland, San Jose’s Café Stritch, Berkeley’s California Jazz Conservatory, and San Francisco’s Black Cat. As the featured vocalist in the SFJAZZ’s Monday Night Big Band, directed by the Jazz Mafia’s Adam Theis, she performs regularly at the SFJAZZ Center. But like with Mirror, her manifold accomplishments are all prelude to the next chapter. “This CD is just the beginning of my journey, showing this is what I did, and this is what I’m doing,” she says. “But I want to move on and explore more and learn more.”