Gillian Margot - Power Flower (2020)

Gillian Margot is a singer with a rare gift that makes people sit up and listen. She possesses an exquisite voice, a disarmingly wide range and a style that eschews jazz singer clichés in favor of an original, interpretive delivery grounded in a song's lyrical and emotional content. A native of Toronto, Canada, Margot studied under a generation of jazz legends including Oscar Peterson, Freddy Cole, Carol Welsman and Norman Simmons. Equally at home in the musical worlds of jazz, R&B, chamber, and pop, she embodies a stage presence and confidence honed through years of performing in major venues worldwide with top-tier talent, including rock icon Sting, jazz trumpeters Chris Botti and Jeremy Pelt, pianist Robert Glasper, famed soprano Kathleen Battle, conductors Wayne Marshall (London Philharmonic) and Jukka-Pekka Saraste (Toronto Symphony Orchestra). Additionally, her voice can be heard in commercials and in film and television programs, including Jane Goodall’s Wild Chimpanzees (IMAX 2002), New Year (Doublesee 2010), North (Novel 2012), and Lethal Weapon (FOX 2016).

Ms. Margot’s album Black Butterfly (Hipnotic 2016) is an artfully crafted set that showcases her multifaceted musicality and speaks to the singer's passion for diversity. Involving some of the most in- demand musicians on the New York scene, the album blends Great American Songbook standards, intriguing jazz originals, gutbucket blues, contemporary hip-hop flavors and uniquely personal covers of songs by Curtis Mayfield, Joni Mitchell, Nina Simone, and 80’s English rockers Simply Red. Her most recent collaboration is with multiple GRAMMY®-nominated pianist Geoffrey Keezer on his latest album, On My Way to You (MarKeez Records 2018). With Margot featured on five of ten tracks, Ted Panken writes that the vocalist and pianist “achieve an uncanny mind-meld on the co-composed ‘You Stay With Me’ — Margot projects her magnificent contralto to equally compelling effect both when conveying her tender, sensuous lyric and then improvising in dialogue with the piano during the latter section. They also co-wrote the percolating ‘Guanajuato’ (named for the Central Mexican city where they performed a duo concert), on which the protagonists engage in a protracted, intuitive musical conversation.”

Power Flower is the title of Gillian’s latest album — a project that took two and a half years to complete and is an homage to the music of her influences in 70s and 80s funk, pop, and jazz. Released in Japan at end of 2019 (Coreport), Power Flower will be released globally in October 2020 on Ropeadope Records.