Kristi Martel Headlines San Francisco's Legendary Yoshi

Date: Aug 13, 2008

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Award-winning songwriter and avant-soul piano diva
Kristi Martel
headlines San Francisco's legendary YOSHI
September 8, 2008

Kristi Martel is thrilled to play Yoshi's 9-foot Steinway grand piano to mark her return to San Francisco for one exclusive show only. Yoshi is one of the most significant jazz venues on the West Coast. The 28,000 square foot location in San Francisco's Fillmore District stands as a flagship of the city's attempt to restore the formerly African-American neighborhood as a center of black culture and jazz.

Featured on MTV/LOGO, NPR, WERS and voted Rhode Island's Best Alternative Rock Female Vocalist, Kristi Martel has been invited on Thursday, September 4, to be the special on-air guest of the legendary KPFA's Bonnie Simmons radio show - arguably the most important DJs in radio history!



Kristi Martel is the only child of a single-parent French Canadian Catholic working class New England family, a family who thinks art and radical feminism are anything but ethical or practical or even real. She started making up harmonies to songs when she was three years old and started piano lessons at seven. Two degrees (Bard and Mills College) and 20 years later she's still at it -- composing, performing, recording, and teaching music.

She writes spectral vocal work, books, performance art, and bluesy "alternative" songs exploring relationships, identity, memory and gender using tape, text, dance, piano and voice. Kristi?s piano playing combines her love of blues dissonance and syncopation with her classical training. Her voice is at once sweet and bitter, able to leap and sore, whisper and rattle, expressive of any emotion she chooses and fluid throughout her 4-octave range.

The San Francisco Report raved: "An excellent singer, she chanted, warbled, improvised, throwing off multiphonics with the greatest of ease."

Kristi is visionary in her lyrics and composition, writing her prayers for personal solace and quirky narratives critiquing various relationships in the same breath.
In 1994 Kristi won the ASCAP Foundation Grant for Young Composers for her two-voice piece, When Outside Gets Inside Through the Skin. With that grant she moved to NYC and created her publishing/music production company Sealed Lip Music.
The talented singer battled successfully against the Goliath of corporate Record label moguls to emerge as one of the most inspirational music heroines of our times.

Through Sealed Lip Records , Kristi has released six CD s. "Ravengirl" is Kristi's goofy joke superhero name for herself, her recognition of the crazy blessing it is that she felt joy everyday, amidst the profound grief, after her former life partner's suicide in 2003.

When asked who's been her biggest influence, she confidently replies:
"My biggest influence is probably Prince. I started listening to him when I was 11, and I saw him live for the first time when I was 12. Kate Bush's music was the first I had ever heard that sounded anything like the music in my head. I started listening to her and Throwing Muses when I was about 14. The Muses' main writer, Kristin Hersh, has continued to be a huge influence on me."

Martel has performed her work on both coasts in a variety of landmark venues solo and in collaboration with many extraordinary gear geeks, dancers and musicians, including Fred Frith, Pauline Oliveros, Bob Boster, Dawn Frank, A. L. Dentel, and the all-women a cappella group, Making Waves. She has shared stages with such amazing artists as Margie Adam, Gwen Avery, Alix Dobkin, Rebecca Riots, Esther, and Allette Brooks.

She has just recorded her next full length CD dubbed "Sacred Whore", due out early 2009. The work is more jazz and soul and focuses on the universal in our human experience and our need for inner and world peace. Kristi's writing is putting a magnifying glass on how actions affect the world as a whole and how we can find ways to heal.

Carrying forth her environmental, social, organic and humanitarian efforts to benefit the community and the planet as a whole, Martel's sound is solidifying the existing symbiosis between "The Green Movement" and "the music industry". She is one of those rare talents whose remarkable accomplishments within the music arena have undeniably positioned her as a powerful creative voice and an influential force certainly to be reckoned with.

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