BARE is the debut recording from The ExPosed Blues Duo featuring vocalist Fay Victor and guitarist Anders Nilsson. Best known for their work together in Ms. Victor’s longstanding quartet, the Fay Victor Ensemble, these frequent collaborators have used this project to create the distinctive, stripped down approach to the blues tradition they have shared with audiences around the world for the past three years.

In the New York Times review Nate Chinen writes about Bare: “the album includes ‘Blue Monk,’ with the pitch-perfect lyrics that (Abbey) Lincoln introduced on Straight Ahead, in an early sign of her writing talent. Ms. Victor does have a voice that recalls Ms. Lincoln, sometimes with spine-tingling clarity. But the power of her evocation isn’t a matter of impersonation: it’s her willingness to imbue a phrase or single word with drawling significance, distending a vowel here, coarsening texture there. These are decisions you can picture Ms. Lincoln making.”

THE FREESONG SUITE

“A jazz singer who makes her notes slow, wide and meaningful—she often sounds like an evening-out of Betty Carter and Abbey Lincoln—Fay Victor uses a great and simple concept on The FreeSong Suite (Greene Avenue Music)…a studio recording organized like a live set. This means the band flows from one song into another, without knowing where it’s going next…these songs have distinct melodic character: fascinating ballads with Anders Nilsson’s country-bluesy guitar soloing, drum chants, some careful free improvising.”
-Ben Ratliff, The New York Times

“The whole thing is as if Joni Mitchell wrote lyrics for a lost Betty Carter prog-rock album — and it totally works.”
-Patrick Jarenwattananon, 10 Greatest Moments from Jazz Recordings in 2009 – NPR Jazz

CARTWHEELS THROUGH THE COSMOS

The first record by the Fay Victor Ensemble, met with enthusisatic reviews when it was released in 2007 through ArtistShare. The record previewed and negotiated the various concepts as they later came together in the FreeSong Suite: freely mixed elements of rock, jazz, traditional songwriting, European art song or chason, and free jazz.

“It’s a borderless, cacophonous, in-your-face experiment in tone poetry and free-form expression. It’s tough.  It’s gutsy.  It’s brilliant.”
–Christopher Loudon, JazzTimes

“Complex, ambitious record…we can add Victor to the Betty Carter family of jazz singers, if we could find anyone else to fill out a family.” (A-)
–Tom Hull, Village Voice

“…actually stretches the definition of jazz vocals”
–JazzWise, UK

“Victor is the traffic director of a group methodology that surges into the interstellar regions of sound.”
–Glenn Astarita, New & Noteworthy Monthly Column, www.AllAboutJazz.com

LAZY OLD SUN

“A boldly inventive Betty Carter-Billie Holiday hybrid…the tremendously versatile Victor takes off into all sorts of curiously exciting directions…she’s a real find, a true original.”
-Christopher Louden, JazzTimes

“Sounds like a young Betty Carter with a bad case of wanderlust…a live set strong enough to win over all but the most anti-vocal jazz-fans…”
-Kurt Gottschalk, Signal to Noise