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"With
this essential addition to her already impressive canon of
performances, looks like she'll be on stage for years to come,
with a thoroughly mesmerized crowd in tow, hanging on every
nuanced interpretation."
Georgia Music Magazine
“She
has a feline sense of assurance onstage and a voice full of
humor…”
The Studio
“[On
Torch Life, she] swings lightly from come-hither cabaret diva to
serious pop interpreter to playful entertainer indulging in
liberating vocalese.”
The Atlanta Journal
Constitution
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“The whole
performance is genuinely breathtaking.”
Creative Loafing, Atlanta
“Gwen is an outstanding vocalist who truly makes any song her own.”
Sambuca Jazz Café, Dallas, Texas
“Hughes…[has] the big open vibrato of a young Sheila Jordan.”
Cadence magazine
“Gwen is one of those ‘chanteuses.’ That means she can really sing
and attracts the best players in town to back her up.”
The Star Bar, Atlanta
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“She is the most
professional musician I’ve ever worked with. And she has this amazing
quality to her voice, this very, very pretty quality…like Billie
Holiday.”
Joe Gransden, trumpeter & vocalist
The
Studio
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Gwen’s
first CD Torch Life consists
of songs she wrote from the age of 16 up until a decade later. And
she eerily covers “Every Breath You Take” by Sting, foreshadowing
the more eclectic bent of her music in the future.
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“I’m the soft
touch that you need / the balm in your Gilead / the whisper of love in
your chaos / the only hope, boy, that you ever had”
“Soft
Touch” – Torch Life
Gwen Hughes, RedWarbler Music
“A great makeout CD…upright bass, hepcat kind of stuff.”
Steve
Craig, WNNX-FM, Atlanta
“The South’s Sexiest Songstress and her killer band are as irresistible
as gravity.”
Borders Books & Music, Atlanta
“Hughes eschews what she calls ‘safe jazz.’ There is definitely nothing
in her performance that would sound at home on a Kenny G album.”
The
Studio
As mentioned in
the “Retro
Jazz Kats” pages the original
live band that toured in support of Torch Life was 14 members strong, a
huge collection of the city’s best players, from cellists to saxophone,
djembe to violin. Gwen wrote and produced the wildly successful “Kool
Kat Lounge-a-Go-Go,” featuring jugglers, cigarette girls and throngs of
adoring swing dancers.
The exhaustion
of running the large band for Torch Life, however, resulted in her
stripped-down sound on most of her second CD’s tracks. Where there had
previously been a full horn section, now there was merely guitar, bass
and drums on many of the tunes.
Lost and Found,
released in 2001, is a “journey” album. During the trip, Gwen &
her band have twice been voted “Favorite Jazz Artist” by Creative
Loafing in Atlanta. Additionally, Gwen’s song “Lights of the City”
was a finalist out of 100,000 songs in the Just Plain Folks/CD
Baby “Best Jazz Songwriting” category. Both Lost and Found and
Torch Life made their way into initial consideration for a Grammy
by the National Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences.
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“All this pretty
paradise is really just passing through / and if you don’t believe me,
you better look inside of you”
“Stranger’s Kiss” – Lost and Found
Gwen Hughes, RedWarbler Music
“It’s hard to be
holy and passionate.”
John Eldredge
The
Journey of Desire
“The perfect landscape of your life / the rolling hills of mine / the
sweetest curves of a night well spent in the safest part of my troubled
heart”
“This
Fire” – Lost and Found
Gwen Hughes, RedWarbler Music
“She’s found for herself a medium through which a woman torn can
exorcise the effects of reckoning the conscious with the libido.”
The
Brunswick News
“You ain’t been
blue / no, no, no / you ain’t been blue / ‘til you get that mood indigo”
Duke
Ellington
recorded for The Misplaced Martini in the Cosmetics section of Parisian
department store
“So, I told him,’ Gwen was explaining to Dally, “when you find somebody
alive today who can write a song as good as Strayhorn or Ellington or
Fats Waller, then we’ll do more original material. Until then, shut the
hell up. Besides, this stuff gets everybody dancing.”
The character “Gwen Hughes” as she appears in Phillip DePoy’s
Dancing Made Easy (Dell Books)
Gwen Hughes & The Retro Jazz Kats
are the “Ambassadors of Jazz” to listeners all over the Southeast,
as well as on national and international stages. The late-2001
album, The Misplaced Martini highlights the humor, humanity and
chutzpah of their live performance. It received general airplay
nationally in 2002, and her rendition of “Fever” charted in the
Top Ten of the 2001-2002
Swing Top 40.
Gwen began touring overseas in 2003 to support all her CDs on
Fairfield Records and continues to charm her way across
continents.
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“Absolutely the
best way to experience jazz is to put us on the spot and see if we crash
and burn. Sometimes we do, and the fun is getting out it!”
Gwen
Hughes
The Gainesville Times
“We surely did enjoy playing The Misplaced Martini.”
Eric
Cohen, Program Director
WAER-FM, Syracuse, New York
“There is no
denying the people’s love for this golden-throated chanteuse.”
Creative Loafing
“Some may know of Gwen Hughes, some may not…but they will.”
WRFG-FM, Atlanta
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Creative Loafing
Reader's pick for
Favorite Jazz Artist. |
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