07 Bria SkonbergWhat It Means
Bria Skonberg
Cellar Music CM072624 (briaskonberg.bandcamp.com/album/what-it-means)

Back in the second half of the year 2000 aficionados, jazz bandleaders and critics were busy extolling the virtues of a young musician from Vancouver. Her name was Bria Skonberg and she played trumpet and sang with seductive vulnerability. Two decades later Skonberg reminds us why so many fell in love with her music, returning to what Hugues Panassié rightly described as le jazz hot

Skonberg’s 2024 installment – her eighth album, entitled What it Means – is red-hot indeed. As with her earlier recordings this one too is eloquent, enterprisingly and imaginatively programmed and reshapes classic repertoire as she propels “hot” charts into a whole new world of her music making. 

In Skonberg’s playing, there’s the familiar virtuosity and refinement that marked her previous albums. She embraces the full resources of her trumpet to recreate classics such as Louis Armstrong’s Cornet Chop Suey and Sidney Bechet’s Petit Fleur. Her originals, In The House and Elbow Bump, show a native’s grasp of the New Orleans idiom and are a triumph of music-making. Her eminently captivating voice adorns John Lennon’s Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy).

Skonberg is helped along the way by New Orleans “royalty” including banjoist Don Vappie, drummer Herlin Riley and the adorable vocalist Gabrielle Cavassa.

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