Emily Bezar plays solo keyboards and sings. Her style is difficult to explain. It’s not pop music or serious composition, but has elements of both. She has an exquisite sense of melody and rhythm which flows forth in her voice and her playing. Her voice is magnificent. Her music may be referred as Jazz, Art-rock, Fusion, Cabaret or Modern Opera.Her complicated songs are rich with jazz harmony and classical vocal precision but they flirt with pop structures and burn with the intensity of rock. They are honest and true, full of passion, elegance, conflict and order. She has availed the wonderful opportunities of singing Mozart and Ravel, Weill and Joni Mitchell, Gershwin and Sondheim, but she is most comfortable with the sound world.
Bezar is a classically-trained musician–both as a vocalist and a pianist. This shows in her vocal work particularly; in her singing there are long, sustained notes that recall the tones of opera singers Jessye Norman and Dawn Upshaw. Most people, however, will put her in the Kate Bush/Tori Amos category (the delicate piano ballads, and she *does* sound awfully like them). However, Bush and Amos, for all of their fantastical storytelling chops and love of the twee and mystical, are pop artists.
Emily started playing classical piano right from her childhood. In her Teen age, She was been successful in developing her rewording keyboard style with the help of her friend’s electric organ and a Beatles book. She joined the Oberlin Conservatory to study opera but was soon attracted to subterranean electronic music studios. On her return to California after Oberlin, She kept her busy with the experiment at Stanford University’s famed computer music center, and finally produced a unique piece of music that won an award at the Bourges Electronic music competition in France. Later on,She led the foundation of her own small studio when she stayed in Zurich, Switzerland in her early and reproduced the songs that would finally fuse the various threads of her musical formations.
In the early 90’s, Emily joined the reputed art-rock band The Potato Eaters and got the opportunities of performing on the city’s biggest stages. The Potato Eaters would release an EP, “I Thought I Heard You” and a live album, “Wreckless”. In 1993, Emily released her debut solo album “Grandmother’s Tea Leaves” which contained her own fully-formed musical vision. More like a collection of lyrical arias and tone-poems than a song album, it earned her comparisons to Kate Bush and Keith Jarrett.
In 1996, Emily formed a band to record her second album, “Moon in Grenadine”. A song cycle about marriage and permanence, MiG was part chamber-jazz, part rock-opera interspersed with some of her most delicate solo piano-vocal songs.
In 1999, after the birth of her first child, she reassembled her band to record what would become her most rock-infused album, “Four Walls Bending”. Melding jazz fusion, progressive rock and electronic soundscapes, she spun soaring melodies against a backdrop of churning guitars and intricate analog keyboard parts. Lyrically, FWB explored her identity as a new mother and the powerful urge to protect a precious creation.
With her 4th and latest album, “Angels’ Abacus,” written while Emily was living in France from 2001-2003, she has produced her most operatic and ambitious work yet. This is music as architecture, as crystalline objects in time, with no agenda but its own sensual and complex beauty.