UN days, jazzy nights

David Winch, UN

Few international civil servants begin their day, on the way to the photocopier or the coffee machine, wondering whether they “should open for B.B. King on his next Australian tour. ”

— Yeah, right. And my next hit sin gle is coming out any day now!
Voyons donc ...

Yet the B.B. King question is one that Geneva musicians Angela Higney and Piero Calvi did have to ponder recently. Higney, who works at the FAO liaison office and Calvi, until recently at UN Geneva’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), decided that the bumpy highway of long tours and road trips was too much to fit into their musical lifestyle. Outback, no; Palais des Nations, oui.

The easy-listening jazz-blues duo, launched in 1999 as The Bliss, will remain at home in Geneva, working around their day-job focus: “If I were 20 years younger … ,” Higney reflects, a bit wistfully, at the P a l a i s ’s Bar de la Presse one autumn morning, “But 2 months away from work, all the travel – can you really just drop everything for that long?”

“There are no guarantees” in the music business, she notes, and touring offers “the least” stability of all. So, The Bliss will continue to do what Calvi and Higney do best: work at their own pace in Geneva with the assurance of a steady income, recording as the inspiration and desire take them, and profiting to the maximum from the new possibilities of music on the Internet.

Web boom keeps exploding

As recently as five years ago, the tale of Calvi and Higney might have ended there: talented part-time musicians giving a few local gigs around town, a CD pressed for sale to family and friends, and maybe a few favourable reviews in the specialized jazz/blues press.

Then came the musical revoluton of the World Wide Web. To d a y, the sound of Higney’s heartfelt vocals and the playful keyboard of instrumentalist Calvi are downloaded around the world. Total sales of their CDs, which number in the hundreds and low thousands, are complemented by hundreds of thousands – and recently even millions – of “hits” and downloads from their page at: w w w. M P 3 . c o m / t h e b l i s s

With a sound that combines elements of jazz vocals, blues and playful techno instrumentalism, and goes under labels as diverse as urban contemporary and “jazz funk”, listeners abound. They cross all barriers and labels to listen on the We b .

The Bliss’s new CD, Silk, due out this month, will include 12 tracks, including the hit “Kinda Girl”, remixed for the Italian dance market. Higney’s vocals, alternately sultry and provocative, embrace a repertoire of self-composed and improvised works, along with occasional covers of well-known hits such as the 1966 “Sunny”. Her voice has been compared by some We b fans to Dianna Krall, and she recognizes a strong interest in the work of Anita Baker, Angela Bofill and Rachelle Ferrell.

Blissful history

While Higney and Calvi began working together in 1996 in Geneva, their histories, musical and professional, came together from afar. Both had worked for the International Red Cross, and their respective musical skills were honed on f a r-flung missions, including in C a l v i ’s case at the occasional piano bar in both Kinshasa and (!) P y o n g y a n g .

H i g n e y, whose background in vocals included little more long- term than a school choir, began to take singing more seriously, she said, on mission to Armenia in 1988. The aftermath of the great earthquake there and the number of skilled people unable to find any fulfilment made her reflect on her own talents, and to take them more to heart. She sang in the early 1990s with Les Horribles Cernettes, a cheeky ‘60s girl band growing out of cultural life at CERN. The group carries the distinction of having its photo be the first ever posted on the World Wide We b .

But Calvi and Higney grew more focused as a duo in the late 1990s, and the name The Bliss was chosen in an Internet poll in mid-1999. This lead to today’s boomlet of Internet recognition, hinting at new musical horizons that beckon.

On the road at home

The possibility of touring is always there, but the duo seems untroubled by what-ifs, and focus instead on the huge new possibilities of the Internet and musical growth there:

” We could drive 10’000 kilometres a month,” notes Calvi — all over Europe, club to club, gig to gig, hand to mouth. “But there would be no guarantees.”

Noting that music industry money is tightly focused on a few millionaire superstar acts, with the rest of the music world scrambling for petty cash, Calvi adds that perhaps all pastimes have evolved: “All hobbies have become commercialized to some extent, with a very few exceptions like maybe gardening. All of them involve money to a greater degree.”

This is surely true even in the international civil service, with its many weekend athletes, amateur painters and the countless novels developing slowly on C drives, where even a busy Under Secretary- General like DPI’s Shashi Tharoor, shows his talents as a novelist and e s s a y i s t .

The advice from musicians of The Bliss is clear: Keep it up, and don’t forget your dreams.

David Winch (dwinch@unog. ch) is an editor at UN Geneva.