Liz Mc Comb

Liz McComb is a singer, compositrice and American pianist of Gospel and spirituals, of Blues, Jazz and Soul, born on December 1st, 1952 with Cleveland (Ohio), called “the pasionaria of the gospel”.

Biography

Elizabeth McComb was born on December 1st, 1952 in Cleveland (Ohio) in an Afro-American family originating in the the Mississippi She is the sixth among seven children. His/her father, factory worker, are deceased when it was small. His/her mother, very religious like all the family, will become prédicatrice and Pasteur of a church pentecotist. Three of his/her sisters off form a vocal group baptized The Daughters Zion, very popular in the local churches. Much later, they will accompany occasionally Liz McComb in its concerts. Liz starts to sing as of the old one three years. At it one listens to mainly the great voices of the gospel: The Staple Singers, Sister Rosetta Tharpe and especially Mahalia Jackson which quickly becomes its idol and its model, from which she learns and takes again the repertory by heart. At the same time his/her single brother, who became trumpet player, reveals the great figures of the jazz to him, of Louis Armstrong with Charlie Parker and max Roach while passing by Nat King Cole and Sarah Vaughan. Liz studied the violin, but quickly forsook it with the profit of the piano, “on which its heart is granted perfectly”, she says. She learns it as an autodidact, and will end up jumping the step on a blow of head, replacing one evening her pianist with the raised foot, to become gradually one of the best singer-pianists of her generation.

Still teenager, it integrates the school then the troop of the arts center Karamu House Theater. She benefits from it to study the history and the culture of the community Afro-American. It is the time of the fight for the civic rights, which will deeply mark its conscience and its whole life. Everyone compliments it since always on its voice and she fugitively dreams to become a star with Broadway. She leaves to New York and postulates with some hearings for reviews and musical comedies. Supported by her cousin Annie Moss, it is recruited in the group The Jean Austin Singers, which will off take part in the European rounds of the famous itinerant review “Roots Rock'n'roll' Roll”. Without never anything to lose enthusiasm, intimacy, naturalness and spontaneousness of the song in the churches - it will never cease there ressourcer - here is Liz propelled on the large international scenes where it will succeed in transcending vis-a-vis the public a great timidity. Regularly turning to Germany, to Spain, to France and Switzerland, it goes there côtoyer from now on “superstars”, for which it can “heat the room so well” by assuming the first part of their concerts, like Bessie Griffin or Helen Humes, Luther Allison or B.B. King, James Brown, Ray Charles, Memphis Slim or Taj Mahal, Randy Weston, etc

Allured by Europe, it “was posed there” like an migratory bird, always turning over several times per annum to its immutable fold: the small family church of Cleveland where it takes the care to let be unaware of with each one its success growing on other bank of the Ocean. It remains initially in Switzerland where it creates sensation with the Festival of Montreux. Then it chooses Paris like main home. It there meets in particular Maurice Cullaz, celebrates critical jazz and pioneer of discovered gospel by Europe, which immediately locates in it a revival of this music. Under its impulse, Liz McComb founds in Paris excel it but alas transitory quartet “Psalms”, with Jerome Van Jones, Lavelle McKinnie Dugan and regretted Gregg Hunter, whose tragic death, shortly after that of his wife, of the continuations of the AIDS, plunges it in a deep depression. It moves away then from the scene. The continuation, it told it with the musicologist Bill Carpenter for the important article that he devoted to him in his masterly “Gospel Music Encyclopedia”: “so much worse if the majority of people do not believe me but Gregg came to visit me; I was on my bed looking at television, I had a hand posed on my head and sudden, my hand moved, independently of my will. Gregg had passed to tell me good-bye. ” Deeply mystical, Liz McComb intensely saw its public personal life and, intimate and artistic, according to rules and “signs” very distant from any rational logic. Curiously, this “miraculous” event which pushed it to live again, therefore to sing again, coincides with the meeting of a character who is almost in any point contrary to his personality. Atheist and free-thinker, former militant trotskyste become fortunate a little by chance, the French producer Gerard Vacher succumbs to the song of Liz McComb at the point to devote the essence of his life to him. In little time, this strange, at the same time fusional and perpetually conflict relation, very quickly will do of Liz McComb what it could have become quite front: a superstar of the gospel, at least also celebrates as such as was its idol Mahalia Jackson.

The quadragénaire Liz McComb learns how to live a double-life. On a side, it makes full house in all the Parisian big rooms, with the Casino of Paris (where it is the only singer Afro-American to obtain same success as formerly Joséphine Baker) as to the Olympia where its triumph points out those of Jimi Hendrix or of Frank Sinatra. It is not moved by it in addition to-measurement, the following day it will take again the plane incognito towards the tiny church of its mom in Cleveland, where it will become again simply what it is really: a singer of gospel among so much of others. Between the impatient enthusiasm of a business manager-fan who wants to make of it a superstar and his own desire to express his faith while remaining before a a whole militant nun, Liz McComb will do nothing but reinforce its personality and will be able very quickly to find a certain balance there. Its very soaked character definitively prevents it from succumbing to the “sin”, with easy temptations of glory and success.

Especially, Liz McComb is perfectly aware to be one of the rare heiresses of a fabulous cultural heritage and musical. As of its first personal discs it was made (without really wanting it) a speciality interpret in a very original way oldest “negro - spirituals”, those of the time of slavery. It is in its generation one of the last to be known, namely to interpret without denaturing them these “songs of freedom” because the history of its family in fact for it an absolutely obvious and natural repertory. It is what makes the historical importance of Liz McComb: with the XXI° century it is perhaps the only singer whose family seems to have bequeathed intact the heritage of the hymns to him African-American of the XIX° century - perhaps even of the XVIII°, of which seems to go back at least one to its favorite songs, “Sinner, Please”. That does not prevent Liz McComb from making the wide variation between the past and the future, to compose with prolifically, and during the years 1990, to impose themselves by its own songs, with the very religious words always, but whose music is impregnated without any reserve of all the contemporary tendencies: drunk person, Funk, Rap, etc

It is invited in all the festivals and it travels much, more and more far. She thus discovers the reality of Africa of her ancestors, whom 99% of the Afro-Americans prefer to ignore. She does not know from which its ancestors come, but she is discovered innumerable cousins at the time of her rounds in Congo, in Ivory Coast or in Senegal. This discovery of an extreme poverty and an extreme dignity make it reflect on the direction of its engagement and its songs. “Does What Happened to the Coil? ” this interrogation expresses well.

Liz McComb, European for twenty years, has been then almost unknown in the United States. However, it will represent the United States in Bethlehem, the concert organized for the 2000 birthday of Jesus! Other concerts, in Palestine and in Lebanon, convinced it to become before all a “messenger of peace”, and another personal song, “The Peacemakers”, will become from now on its antienne, it will sing it everywhere, with innumerable choral societies.

At this point in time the musical life of Liz McComb knows a rather amazing bracket. As pushed by a presentiment, it flies away towards La Nouvelle-Orléans to record there a rather extraordinary disc, very different from all that it did until there. Premonition or simple chance, each one is free to judge some: “Spirit off New Orleans”, hastily recorded with some of the best musicians of the place, can be listened like a true musical will of this city before the catastrophe of Katrina.

Liz McComb is also impassioned for the songs and the traditional drums of the Caribbean, in particular those of the Guadeloupe, convened with its concerts of the years 2006-2007, and present in the trilogy of cds which it starts under the title: “Drunk, Peace & Coils”. Liz McComb is affirmed thus like the instigator of the “total gospel”, to take again the expression of American journalists. This concept invented for it reflects especially the fact that Liz McComb became more “mondialized” of the singers of gospel. It is the only one of its generation which knew to escape, like had made formerly its idol, its model Mahalia Jackson, with the narrow nationalism which claimed to make gospel an exclusively American music.

It has a son, Frank Mccomb.Son name says to you can be not large thing, and yet he is also pianist singer like his mom. One confuses his voice with those of donny hathaway and stevie wonder

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