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Angela also has two very unique original music projects: the Post-Modern Folk Experimentation, The Global Folk, as well as a scaled down version of the same featuring guitarist Ken Rosser, and her new Expressionist Jazz Movement, The Slow Club Quartet, up and running, and which are all available for showcase rooms, clubs, concerts, and festivals:

 

   

 

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Biography

 

Have you ever had a genuinely mystical phenomenon happen to you?

The very first song that Angela Carole Brown ever wrote, The Slow Club, which ultimately became the title cut of her acclaimed jazz CD, is about a nightclub in Paris. At the time she wrote it she'd never been to the city of lights. The story in the song is fiction. The club itself is fiction. And in the song she describes in great detail what the mood and look and walls and smell are like in this place. A few years after writing it and performing it around town, she was singing it at a club one night, and a French woman came up to her afterwards. This was the exchange:
 

"I enjoyed your song very much. It makes me think back with fond memory of my days at the Slow Club."

 "I beg your pardon? Your days at the Slow Club? But this song is fiction."
 

"Oh, no. The Slow Club in Paris, France, oui?"
 

I'm sorry, ma'am, but I think you may be thinking of someplace else. There isn't really a Slow Club. It's just a made-up place for a made-up song. I think I would know, since I wrote it. I just sort of have this fixation for that city, for some reason."
 

"And mademoiselle, I believe I would know. I'm the one who's been to this place you sing about. On the Rue du Rivoli, right down the way from the Louvre. I would say that is some pretty powerful fixation."


Angela's jaw was dropped for the next two years, as she sang this song around town, told this story, and relished in her, and her song's, spooky allure. Until she finally made it to Paris for the first time several years later, and looked up the Slow Club in her tourist guide book. And there it was, with a Rue du Rivoli address, as promised. The first chance she got, Angela went there and walked in, unprepared for an even newer set of phenomena. Every single detail she speaks of in the song was personified before her eyes, from the winding staircase that takes one down into it, to the smoky, blue ambience that invited secret rendezvous on the stairs.

She stood there and grinned from ear to ecstatic ear at the wonders of her life, and decided that she must've been that Slow Club chanteuse in another lifetime, simply recalling pockets of memory from a long-dormant nether-plane.

Thus began Angela's journey as a writer, and carrying with her at all times the wonders that art simply begets.

Now to date, Los Angeles native and recipient of the Heritage Magazine Award in poetry, contemplative singer-songwriter Angela Carole Brown's unique use of the poetic to craft themes of elevated thought, combined with a keen harmonic sensibility, stands her enigmatic music out from the rest. 

 

She has been a veteran of the L.A. music scene for two decades as a vocalist, recording artist, and songwriter. She has recorded voice-overs, movie cues, jingles, and CDs for herself and other artists, her most recent being Josh Groban's hit single "You Raise Me Up" on his Closer CD for Warner Bros. Records; for South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker; and for the independent film Funny Money, starring Chevy Chase. She has worked theatre, clubs, concert halls, television, and radio, in the U.S., Europe, and Asia.

She is also a novelist, who last year brought us her debut novel, TRADING FOURS, on Infinity Publishing; about which she has been interviewed on KPFK's Arts in Review and KUCI's Blacklisted; favorably reviewed by Ontario author and book reviewer Matt St. Amand; given honorable mention in Music Connection Magazine and by the National League of Women as an example of Women in Fiction; and featured in an Ejazznews.com article entitled Jazz Encounters of the Literary Kind, by John Stevenson.

Angela has released two very different music projects on her own Rue de la Harpe Records label:  With her group The Global Folk (and the scaled-down duo version with guitarist Ken Rosser), she has released the Post-Modern Folk Experimentation, Resting on the Rock, which utilizes instruments from around the world, and which held onto #5 on American Idol Underground for nine weeks; as well as their most recent Music for the Weeping Woman.  And with her group The Slow Club Quartet, she has released the aforementioned jazz recording, The Slow Club, which was nominated for a Just Plain Folks Music Award, and their most recent release Expressionism.

Angela began her career, however, as an actress, after graduating from the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, and landing work with various Los Angeles theatre companies, performing the repertoires of Shakespeare, Williams, Brecht, Shaw, and Puccini, to name a few. 

Her singing career began by joining various bar bands; and in 1984, won the grand prize in the first-ever (to become annual) Stardom Pursuit singing contest sponsored by the old legendary Rose Tattoo Cabaret in Los Angeles. 

In 1989, her debut CD, Angela, produced by David Garfield for Teichiku Records, rose to #2 on Japan’s pop charts, leading her to be featured on Tokyo's NHK variety television show Music Dream Collection. 

In 1994, she authored, composed, and starred Off-Broadway in her critically lauded one-woman show, The Purple Sleep Café, at Primary Stages' 45th Street Theatre in New York City.

In 1995, she released a CD of jazz standards, Standard Procedure, on Sand Canyon Records, with pianist Dana Bronson and bassist Jim DeJulio, longtime collaborators with her from the Four Seasons Beverly Hills. 

In 1996, she created the role of larger-than-life vixen The Fabulous Miss Thing for the exquisitely radical Elvis Schoenberg's Orchestre Surréal, a wild, genre-bending orchestral show, which must be checked out! Her involvement with the twenty-seven piece orchestra included work as performer, contributing writer, and art director (take note Angela's animated original art work, at the start of the site).

For seven years, Angela was "Miss Thing" to select Los Angeles audiences, through the release of two CDs, Air Surréal, and It's Alive!, for which she created the artwork that serve as their covers; a slot on Music Connection's Best Unsigned Acts List, and as L.A. Weekly's "Music Pick of the Week" in 2000. Her final performance with the orchestra, in 2003, was their John Anson Ford Amphitheatre debut, a show that ended up winning the L.A. Music Award for "Best Rock Opera of the Year." 

Angela has had the honor to perform with/for David Foster, Keb Mo, Ricky Martin, Trey Parker & Matt Stone, Heatwave, Linda Taylor of Threshold and Whose Line Is It, Anyway? Rita Coolidge, Danny Seraphine, Marilyn McCoo & Billy Davis Jr., Billy Childs, Linda Hopkins, Freda Payne, Trini Lopez, Roy Clark, Al Wilson, and Peter Yarrow (of Peter, Paul, & Mary).

Today, however, Angela speaks to us most uniquely through her newest canon of original songs, and as a woman of letters.

 

                 © 2005 Angela Carole Brown