Bio

LISA ENGELKEN is a fearless singer with a daunting stage presence.  Her horn-like phrasing and tonal clarity puts a chill back into contemporary jazz vocals as she “defines the ‘extra’ in extraordinary“  (Jazz Times).

Part freight train, part junkyard trombone, the tumbleweed Engelken alternately locomotes and floats through a myriad of moods & vocal styles, spicing her tunes with Portuguese, French, Spanish and Italian.  But operatic and theatrical training couldn’t polish off the rough edges as she wields her acrobatic 3-octave range like a weapon, like a wand, intensified by sheer joy, crankiness and irony.

Engelken hails from Big Skies, Kansas and the vocalist thanks birth order – the youngest child in an enormous family- for facilitating her vocal development:  sheer power, technique and “Mata Hari vocals”  (Village Voice)  surely resulting from the years this Tiny Who strived to be heard (“I’m here! I’m here!”) above the constant din and chaos that surrounded her.

Lisa’s  first concerts were performed to an imaginary camera whilst riding tractors or tying bales under a relentless summer sun, retrieving the family’s milk cow from across the fields, or weeding a giant garden that produced the most succulent tomatoes ever known to mankind.  The entire Joni Mitchell box set  was performed for the cattle, always apt & attentive (a captive audience. literally.) as she sang and accompanied herself on a tin gallon can, as she could discover no way to roll the piano out to the fields and her alto sax experimentation proved too aggressive for bovine appreciation.

Influenced by a wide variety of musical genres, Lisa sets herself apart with an almost visceral need to convey a song’s story not only through the lyric but through vocal attack, arrangement, and harmony:

“Musical tones have very distinct colors and can be used to paint a sort of sonic picture.  And there is no reason why that sonic canvas should be limited by tradition or set rules of genre.  I find musical ‘mutts’ much more fun, much more interesting.”

Lisa’s fluency in Italian inspires her to reference romance languages and repertoire in performance (She once sang in Japanese, whilst performing the traditional Fan Dance in full Geisha attire, under the coaching of Japanese performance poetess Shizumi.).

Engelken arrived in San Francisco from the East Coast where she’d co-founded the DC-based sextet The Zimmermans with Jonathan Spottiswoode.  The Zimmermans recorded four albums:  the zimmermans,  Cut,  The Loneliest Woman in the World, and You’re Beautiful, We’re the Zimmermans. While with the Zimms, Lisa was awarded the Wammie Award for Best Female Vocalist as the notorious front-woman and appeared at such  festivals including South By Southwest (SXSW) in Austin, North By Northeast (NXNE) in Toronto, New York New Music Festival and the Philadelphia Music Conference.  Lisa played such venues as the Knitting Factory, Bottom Line and the Mercury Lounge (New York); Blues Alley, 9:30 Club and the Black Cat (Washington, DC) among the venues across The States and Canada.

While in DC, Lisa also co-founded & fronted the jazz/lounge quintet Black Olive which resulted in her releasing the jazz vocal album “Cosmopolitan” [free download].  While in DC, Sony Records representatives shuttled Lisa to shows down South to nurture her alter-ego and to front the outrageous theatrical pop-rock band the Sugar La-Las of Birmingham, AL (Yes, that pistol was a real that Lisa was a-slingin’ at her debut performance with the La-Las.)

After a brief stint in New York, Lisa moved to San Francisco, and set to work as composer and vocal coach for the Bare Bones Theatre Company (Sam Shepard‘s “Seduced“  and  “A Lie of the Mind” (Dean Goodman Award).   She wrote “Geographically Challenged,” an album of originals and recorded the tracks in both San Francisco & Manchester, England working with drummer/songwriter Matthew Swindells.

Ready to play the original tunes live, Lisa assembled her new San Francisco-based group, fronting the group on bass and vox.  The band was only picking up momentum when Engelken accepted the role as Yitzhak in the San Francisco production of the rock musical Hedwig and the Angry Inch.  Lisa was awarded the Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle Award for Best Supporting Actress for her portrayal as Hedwig’s boyfriend.  By the time her stint with Hedwig had ended, her bandmates from the original project had dispersed across the globe.

With Hedwig over, Lisa continued to gig some, but (re)turned her focus to her second passion:   Italian literature & culture.  She obtained an M.A. in Italian Language & Literature and accepted a Lecturer position in the Italian Program at San Francisco State University.

Whilst on Fellowship to Italy, Lisa attended two glorious weeks of the Umbria Jazz Festival.  It was then that she decided to cut a the jazz vocal album (Caravan) with the goal of returning Umbria Jazz as a performer.  Soon after her return Stateside,  Lisa experienced the shock of losing a brother who was very supportive of her music.  Her loss spurred her to begin writing the arrangements for the album.  Lisa solicited tenor saxophonist/composer David Alt to tutor her in theory & harmony.  Six months later Lisa entered the Bay Records studio in Berkeley to record the basic tracks to Caravan.

One month before that session, Lisa was struck by a car whilst crossing a city street on foot.  And as she was being whisked away to SF General by paramedics (having been propelled 10 feet through the air to land on her hard head), the final two-line tag for “From the Earth” came to her, thus giving a whole new meaning to the phrase “happy accident.”

Whilst plotting and scheming in dank, dark studios, Engelken did little “live” performance.  She did have the opportunity to captivate a capacity crowd at the San Jose Jazz Festival, with a band that included both seasoned jazz greats like Frank Martin (Sting, Al Jarreau) and up-&-coming artists such as Mike Olmos (Etta James).  Moreover, Lisa had the delight to work once again with (and to perform live with) New York writer/director John Cameron Mitchell [Hedwig & the Angry Inch, Shortbus, Rabbit Hole] in 4 riotous sold-out shows at the Victoria Theatre (Marc Huestis Presents) in San Francisco.

Caravan was released on Kansas Day 2010 to critical acclaim and has  just named to the “BEST of 2010″ List by the Jazz Journalist Association.  Since its release, Lisa has been playing to enthusiastic sold-out audiences across the U.S.  The new year has Lisa looking forward to expanding her audiences here in the U.S. and abroad.  She is currently writing and arranging new material to debut and to then record in Fall 2011.

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