Miss Tess - Modern Vintage (2007) 320kbps

Miss Tess is a young, Boston-based songwriter, whose “Modern Vintage” sound bridges eras and genres. True to the tradition, her vocals can soar or caress as she strums and picks her way through an array of styles, from ragtime, to blues; country, to swing. Tess writes songs with the folk sensibilities of a troubadour that engage roots-devotees and newcomers alike. A typical set conjures a cast of dreamers and lovers, down on their luck and charming their ways in and out of trouble, with familiar faces mingling in the crowd, courtesy of folks like Bessie Smith and Tom Waits—perpetual muses to her style.

In her Baltimore youth, Miss Tess was lullabied by the sounds of her father’s Big Band rehearsing in a basement below her bedroom. Her mother played upright bass, and large jam parties were a familiar household sound. Tess studied classical piano as a child, and in her teens, began banging out her first few chords on an acoustic guitar. Once in a while, her parents would coax her to croon out a standard like Crazy, or Dream A Little Dream of Me. By her early 20’s, she had fallen in love with the likes of Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughn and her guitar playing took a turn for the better under the tutelage of local jazzer Steve Abshire.