Krystle Warren and The Faculty
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Krystle Warren and The Faculty

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"The Krystle Method"

She's going to be superfamous, isn't she?"
Details:
Krystle Warren, Monday, January 19, 2 p.m., at the Gem Theater.

As loaded questions go, this one packs a full clip. The woman firing it is sitting against the wall in a candlelit loft on the top floor of a crumbling brick building in the River Market. The room is filled with hipsters and amateur humanitarians, but the woman's aim is directed at Krystle Warren, who is perched on a stool a few feet away. Warren is hunched over her guitar, her face contorted with effort as she sings and scats and clears her own path through the peaks and valleys of Loudon Wainwright III's "Suicide Song."

She is going to be superfamous, isn't she?

Maybe. But speculating on the future yield of Krystle Warren Enterprises takes all the excitement out of watching Krystle Warren in the here and now. She's a paradox: sophisticated songstress and hard-drinking hippie, mild-mannered folkie and rabble-rousing firecracker, humble young heartland woman worming her way into the Big Apple.

She may become famous, or at least as famous as a girl from south Kansas City can get throwing Billie Holiday and Bob Dylan and Count Basie and the Beatles into a sinewy acoustic stew served with Popeye's Chicken and a chilled glass of Patrón. Or maybe she'll just be that friend who sits on your front porch strumming and humming "I Am the Walrus" while you smoke sticky icky and laugh hysterically about old Simpsons episodes.

Three months ago, Warren joined the great diaspora flocking from the backwoods, suburbs and cities of the Bible Belt to New York City and Los Angeles, those cultural beacons bookending the dreams of America's artists. Warren has set up residence in the East Village, gamely wading into the river of musicians, writers, actors and artists posing as valets, waitresses, delivery drivers and dishwashers.

But now she's made a trip back home. A few hours before her appearance in the loft, she is sitting at Minsky's Pizza in the River Market, giving a rough synopsis of her life while Mister Mister's "Broken Wings" drifts through the restaurant. The 22-year-old is a Kansas City native. She's a singer. She's a songwriter. She fuses elements of folk and jazz music. She has short hair. She's female. She's African-American.

Oh. She's Tracy Chapman.

"I fucking hate that," Warren says. "I absolutely loathe being compared to Tracy Chapman."

She gets that a lot. The comparison is groundless to most who look past the obvious similarities and realize that the two really have little in common. Warren can talk passionately about the Beatles and 40-ounce bottles of Ballantine, discuss the Shins and the spicy chicken sandwich at Wendy's, opine about racism and gentrification and broken homes with the same fervor with which she discusses Gates barbecue sauce, The Big Lebowski and the police warrant with her name on it.

"Let's just say it's very easy to end up in legal hot water for inciting a riot," Warren says with a laugh.

Later, she elaborates on her legal wranglings while sitting in a friend's parked car, passing a bottle of Early Times whiskey. It seems that Ms. Warren's raucous 21st birthday party (which featured a hired dwarf) prompted a visit from Kansas City's finest. When one of the officers threatened to mace the partygoers if they did not disperse, Warren vigorously questioned the legality of such a maneuver and was promptly placed in handcuffs. She subsequently missed several court dates after moving to New York City, which led to the warrant. (Warren eventually appeared in court and earned a sentence for community service.)

Beat that, Tracy Chapman. The cheese-and-wine affair at the loft is ostensibly a benefit for villages in Kenya and Tanzania, but the congregation is decidedly more fixated on Warren than on building Third World classrooms. People stand at the fringes of the large, empty room and sip cabernet and chat politely as Warren sits on a stool by the window, crooning "Eleanor Rigby," her eyes shut in a wince: Ahhhhh, look at all the lonely people ... where do they all belong?

Warren was seventeen years old when she bought her first guitar and began teaching herself to play by emulating Revolver-era tunes. She'd left home two years before, supporting herself by working at Burger King, living with relatives and foster families, and shuttling to four high schools in two years.

She was a coffee-shop fixture by the time she graduated from the Paseo Academy for the Fine and Performing Arts. Bassist Solomon Dorsey introduced Warren to jazz, and she began easing her way into open-mic sessions at the Blue Room, where she steadily improved and slowly began to weave her sound into a jazz-folk hybrid.

Warren's transient childhood had already helped pour the foundation for her eclectic taste and her ability to establish a rapport with just about anyone. She is funny and polite and courteous and friendly, and there's a gleam of wildness in her eyes.
- The Pitch Kansas City


"Krystle Warren (5 stars)"


Krystle Warren is a force to be reckoned with. The 23-year old Kansas City import came on the scene in New York in 2004, and she's not holdin' back. With a sound that is far beyond her years in worldliness and a deep and soulful voice that can switch from a whisper to a stirring bellow in the moment before you catch your breath, Krystle commands a stage—or a train platform—like a warrior princess with a gracious smile.

Blending the genres of folk and jazz and weaving words together with uncanny agility, this singer-songwriter taught herself guitar at 17 and has since performed in her native Missouri, in subways stations and clubs around New York City, and with Cody Chestnutt as an opening band for Erykah Badu. Krystle says: "I'm a hopeless romantic. I love music, I love life, I love my friends, and yeah, I hope to wow my mother one day." - Better Propaganda


"On the Horizon: Krystle Warren & The Faculty"

t’s hard to write about a band that hasn’t released a full-length album yet (they do have an EP, The Diary), but I’m going to try anyways. I’ve listened to Krystle Warren’s & The Faculty’s four Myspace songs and they are all different and all deliciously good. Her voice is strong, soulful, sexy and often androgynous (an underrated quality that I particularly appreciate). The music itself is sparse and mellow folky/pop/blues/whatever you want to call it. She lists her influences as The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Stevie Wonder, Joni Mitchell, Rufus Wainwright and The Beach Boys. So, you get it, it’s classic, not experimentally modern. So normally a band like this might not be exactly up my alley, but the combination of:
A)the band’s funny pictures and captions
+ B)their funny bios
+ C)Krystle’s voice
+ D)Krystle’s ache-inducing good looks
= new stranger musician crush.

I should maybe start a feature titled Strange Musician Crush because I do seem to develop them frequently. They’re currently recording a full-length album at Electric Lady Studios and playing some summer shows in Brooklyn, NY. - LOGOonline


""...diary" by Krystle Warren and the Faculty"

I know it is only September, but I think I have found the make-out album of the year.

Now, given my passionate yet fickle nature, I usually try to steer clear of making grand pronouncements. And this particular accolade is tough to come by considering so few albums these days possess the classic elements of a great make-out album. But the new EP from acclaimed singer-songwriter and college-radio standout Krystle Warren touches them all.

What, you may ask, makes a great make-out album? Much of what goes into choosing mood music is deciding on what kind of mood you want. In terms of romantic music, you want the perfect combination of calm and energetic.

You want something soft enough to relax to. Drum-heavy rock, punchy brass and most rap songs need not apply. You don’t want surprises, like big swells or blasts, to throw you off your game.

That doesn’t mean it’s time to break out the Enya. Slow, droning acoustic music, new-age sound effects and other sleepy do-nothing tracks should be left to health spas and psychiatric facilities. If you set a boring mood, your romantic evening will seem slow and sluggish. You have to keep some electricity, some rhythm in the air.

But the most important element of picking make-out music is consistency. All the above elements have to remain throughout an album’s duration. The worst case scenario is choosing an album that starts off soft and sweet but amps up into loud, heavy rock, waking up the neighbors and sending you and that special someone out of bed and scurrying to the stereo to stop the madness. It’s an awkward situation. Avoid at all costs.

It is in this regard that Krystle Warren and The Faculty’s new EP, Diary, is a true success. Warren began her career as a singer-songwriter in the traditional sense, reciting poetry over lilting, pleasant acoustic notes. Her husky R&B-style vocals and free-form guitar style eventually brought her to the varied jazz clubs across her hometown of Kansas City, Missouri. Her experiences playing clubs like the Blue Room speaks volumes in a place like Kansas City, historically known for jazz and blues innovation. It was at the Blue Room that Warren met many of the musicians who would shape her unique sound.

She moved to New York, following her bassist and friend Soloman Dorsey in pursuit of a dream. And the rest, they say, is history.

Diary is an EP that does what all EP’s should; it leaves the audience wanting. With 6 songs of dense lyrical content, frolicking organ-and-brass undertones and Warren’s smoky-room vocals, Diary perfectly straddles the EP fence between feeling like a cohesive effort and making the listener want more.

Warren’s website lists a talented stable of influences which are easily observed when listening to Diary. At her best, Warren sounds like a young Stevie Wonder, her vocal tone and inflection seeming to channel My Cherie Amour on more than one occasion. And her recent bookings on tours with the likes of Erykah Badu and Martha Wainwright have afforded her new listeners outside the college radio, singer-songwriter sect.

Krystle Warren and the Faculty are working on their first full-length, Circles with 2-time Grammy-Award winning producer Russell Elevado at New York’s famed Electric Lady Studios. I know I am anxious to see what this jazzy-folk quintet will do next. But if you just can’t wait that long, the band invites you to check them out live, where saxophone player Zach Djanikian says his band "makes the panties drop." Looks like I’m not the only one who nominates Diary as a classic make-out album.

So remember to choose your mood music carefully. When you find yourself in a romantic situation, take a page from Krystle Warren: be smooth but not boring, passionate but graceful. Always be consistent and, above all, leave them wanting more. - EDGE Boston


Discography

Diary (2007 / Velour)
New LP due in 2008 (signed by Because, home of Manu Chao and Amadou & Miriam)

Photos

Bio

Seeing Krystle Warren perform for the first time is a striking experience. First, there is the utter improbability of it all: she shuffles onstage with little more than a low-key hello, and proceeds to sing with an effortless power that completely belies her tiny frame. Hearing her fill a crowded club without using a microphone … that’s a Voice. And then there are her vocal stylings, which feature a melisma as rich as that of Wonder or Hathaway, but put all of that technique at the service of music that has never heard such a thing – folk and country, songs influenced by everyone from Nick Drake to Joni Mitchell to Willie Nelson. But when you’ve gotten past the incongruities, you quickly begin enjoy her for what she is – a wholly original singer-songwriter-poet in an age of few.

One would expect, judging from Krystle’s honeyed voice and sophisticated lyrics, that she’d come from a long line of professional musicians, but that isn’t the case. Born and raised in Kansas City, music was casual in the Warren home, from her grandmom’s eight track tapes to the lullabies her family sung around the house, to a brief and much-hated stint in the church choir. She herself remembers starting to sing at the age of four, but it wasn’t until she saw an ABC special on The Beatles at age 13 that she really became passionate about learning and performing music. Krystle learned her first chords by ear from Rubber Soul and Revolver, and her musical horizons quickly expanded to include grunge (Smashing Pumpkins and Soundgarden), classic Brit Pop (The Kinks, The Who, The Faces) and even jazz, in particular Betty Carter, Nina Simone, Kurt Elling and even Mel Torme. With these diverse influences, it wasn’t surprising that she quickly developed a sound of her own.

At 17, Krystle took her fledgling songwriting skills out into KC’s thriving counterculture, befriending numerous avant-garde artists, from painters to street poets to singers, who gave her the support to move forward with her music. "I knew a lot of amazing people in Kansas City," Krystle recalls, “quite a few musicians and composers who were really into something new. Though I started in the singer/songwriter scene, I began performing in a lot of jazz spots when I was about twenty, and those folks were really helpful in my education."

While Krystle never perceived a glass ceiling on what she could accomplish musically in the Midwest, she did feel a growing wanderlust. “I could have gone anyplace, Austin, San Francisco; it didn’t matter much to me. I just wanted to see something new, and somehow that place was NYC. I did choke up a bit leaving KC -- I’d never lived anywhere else. My very first night in NYC was thrilling, but after crashing on numerous couches in the West Village, I began to feel like I was in over my head.” Krystle eventually fell in with some jazz musicians, moving into their apartment in Harlem. This was one of many collaborations, and within a year Krystle had met the musicians who were to form the core of her steady band, The Faculty.

With The Faculty on board, Krystle’s live shows have been garnishing praise from both fans and critics alike, and she’s toured the US with artists ranging from Martha Wainwright to Zap Mama, from Rodrigo & Gabriela to Erykah Badu. Warren also recently had the opportunity to fulfill a dream by performing at the legendary Newport Folk Festival. “The best part of Newport, other than playing, was the backstage community – at one point I was standing next to Elvis Costello and Diana Krall, watching Bright Eyes perform! Another high point was when I was missing a guitar strap, and Emmylou Harris’ manager came over and offered me her guitar strap.”

The debut EP by Krystle Warren & The Faculty, Diary, is available now. The band is also finishing their first full-length album, recorded with two-time Grammy-winning producer Russell Elevado. Recorded at the fabled Electric Lady Studios, the upcoming LP will be out in 2008 on Because Records. “The main difference between Diary and the new LP is the amount of time spent. Diary was recorded quickly, but with Circles I was able to make a much more polished record. It’s seductive to produce, especially someone like me who’s such a big Rufus Wainwright head! I love fleshing out arrangements and molding a concept. Plus we recorded everything analog, so the texture of the music is thick, almost a Steely Dan sound.”

In the meantime, Krystle can be found on a mic somewhere in NYC a few times a week, doing what she does best. “Who knows what's going to happen?” she says of her forthcoming record releases. “I sure don't. I'm extremely lucky that I wasn't completely disillusioned by my first three months in New York and now, watching my audiences grow, I'm even more happy that people seem to appreciate what I’m doing. I mean, I’m just playing what I love. Brit pop, classic rock, as well as jazz and R&B -- so many styles that all stem from the same thing."