A Powerful Conversation with Kellylee Evans

Six albums deep and Juno Award winner Kellylee Evans is still shaking it up on Come On, her latest Decca album. The stylistic connoisseur has tackled everything from jazz to R&B and pop in such previous tasty classics fight or flight?, Nina – her Juno-winning tribute to the legendary Nina Simone – and I Remember When. Praised by the Latin Jazz Network for a "gorgeous voice (that) rises to the heavens in rapturous wonder as if in consanguinity with a chorus of angels" and by the Yukon Arts Centre for "a stunning crystalline voice, both powerful and emotive," Evans now pushes her muse firmly into the soulful pop territory with Come On: a wonderfully refreshing album about love and life that comes on the heels of two nearly career-ending accidents: a freak lightning strike in her Ottawa kitchen and further effects of a concussion suffered during a fall at her home. However, Evans is nothing if not resilient: the runner-up of the 2004 Thelonious Monk Competition offers views on love and loss in an alluringly rhythmic approach that has touches of psychedelic pop, resonating soul groove and that je ne sais quoi that is strictly Kellylee and forged by her jazz discipline. From the stirring soul-stomper "Come On" - which combines an effervescent Motown feel with traces of psychedelia – and the funky groove-a-liciousness of "Hands Up" to the string-and-horn-spiced magnetism of "Know His Worth," the 10 songs of Come On find Kellylee at her most magically potent. Produced and co-written by Eric Legnini (Stefano Di Battista), this is post-romantic soul at its finest; a project of strong vision and great execution that signals the return of Kellylee Evans as a bold explorer and interpreter. It only gets better when you experience her live, in her element.