Kenya Moses at Keys Jazz Bistro

Kenya Moses and pianist Camille Mai at The Back Room in Berkeley on February 20, 2020 (screenshot from YouTube video)

Readers may recall that my last encounter with jazz vocalist Kenya Moses took place at the beginning of July at Lyon & Swan, located at the south end of Columbus Avenue in the shadow of the Transamerica Pyramid. Sadly, Lyon & Swan was basically a supper club, where we seemed to be the only people paying attention to the music, while all the other tables were flooded with jabber about career and money. Last night Moses moved north along Columbus, hanging a right on Broadway to arrive at the Keys Jazz Bistro. This was a venue where everyone was there for the music.

Instrumental accompaniment was provided by the trio of Tammy Hall on piano, Aaron Germain on bass, and Brian Andres on drums. Ironically, my last encounter with Hall took place almost exactly a year ago, when she concluded the final program of the San Francisco International Piano Festival with a set in which Johann Sebastian Bach provided a punctuation mark for Nina Simone. Last night her repertoire shifted over to Antônio Carlos Jobim, whose songs provided the heart and soul of Moses repertoire. The trio took two tunes of its own before Moses came on stage and played one more piece when she took a break about midway through the set.

Moses calls her programs Bossa e Bossa, and her repertoire is guided primarily by bossa nova and samba. Born in Americus, Georgia, she is of African and Afro-Brazilian heritage. However, her earliest years were spend in Darmstadt, Germany, where she had her first experiences with both singing and playing piano. She then moved to California at the age of six.

She has been working on her Bossa e Bossa repertoire since 2010. While her primary focus has been on Jobim, last night she sang a Portuguese account of “Fly Me to the Moon,” possibly reflecting on an earlier vocalist that took great interest in Jobim’s songs, Frank Sinatra. At the end of her program, she shifted over to another Brazilian composer that advanced the bossa repertoire, Luiz Bonfá. Her final selection was “Manhã de Carnaval,” which was included in the soundtrack for the film Black Orpheus.

She then teased the audience by quizzing them on how many different titles had been given to this tune. Since the film was directed by Marcel Camus, who was French, one of those titles was “La Chanson d'Orphée” (which never came up last night). Many call the tune “Black Orpheus;” and those wishing to be more specific call it the “Theme from Black Orpheus.” Others reduce the original title down to just “Carnival.” The Wikipedia entry for the tune also includes “A Day in the Life of a Fool,” which, like the French title, never turned up last night.