Bio

LISA ENGELKEN hails from Big Skies, Kansas.  Being the youngest child in an enormous family facilitated her musical development:  power, technique and “Mata Hari vocals”  (Village Voice)  that could only result from years of this Tiny Who screaming “We’re Here! We’re Here!”, and acute listening skills, honed by futile attempts to better orchestrate the din and chaos that constantly surrounded her.

Lisa’s  first concerts were performed to an imaginary camera whilst 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.  A repertoire of Joni Mitchell & Judy Collins was performed for the feed cattle, always apt & attentive (a captive audience, literally) as she sang and accompanied herself on a tin gallon can.

Lisa may have left the tractor behind, but her training in classical voice & theatre couldn’t completely polish off her rough edges.  Like weapon, then wand, this singer wields her impressive 3-octave range, intensified by sheer joy, then crankiness, sadness then irony.

During a particularly intense moment in performance Lisa once elicited the exclamation “She is channeling Hera!” from a young woman in the audience.  Delighted to hear later of this response, Lisa marveled at acuity and intuition of this woman, observing  that “Hera, too, considered the cow sacred.”   However, one cannot be certain if the Greek Goddess had ever mesmerized the ancient bovine with her voice.

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 (and she once sang in Japanese, whilst performing the traditional Fan Dance in full Geisha attire, under the coaching of Japanese poet 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 three albums “the zimmermans“,  “Cut” and “The Loneliest Woman in the World.” Lisa was awarded the Wammie Award for Best Female Vocalist as their notorious front-woman.  She has appeared at various 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 has played such venues as the Knitting Factory, Bottom Line, the Mercury Lounge (New York); Blues Alley, 9:30 Club, the Black Cat (Washington, DC), as well as in venues in various cities 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“.  During this time, Lisa was also commuting to Birmingham, AL to nurture her alter-ego and front the outrageous theatrical pop-rock band the Sugar La-Las (Yes, that was a real gun she slung at her debut performance in Alabama.)

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, where she’d met drummer Matthew Swindells.

Ready to play the original tunes live, Lisa assembled her new San Francisco-based group, fronting and playing bass.  The band only just got going when she was cast 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 of Yitzhak.  By the time the Hedwig run ended, the rest of the band from her original project had dispersed across the globe.

With Hedwig over, Lisa continued to gig some, but (re)turned her focus to a second gnawing 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 new jazz vocal album (Caravan) so that she could return to 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.  His accident and her loss spurred her to begin writing arrangements for the album, yet untitled.  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 for the first time with) New York writer/director John Cameron Mitchell [Hedwig & the Angry Inch, Shortbus] in 4 riotous sold-out shows at the Victoria Theatre (Marc Huestis Presents) in San Francisco.

Now that the album is out– Caravan went on sale Kansas Day, 2010 and celebrated its digital release on February 26th, 2010, in memory of her brother Larry–  Lisa is currently booking and planning tour dates in the U.S. and Italy.

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