Lavay Smith & Her Red Hot Skillet Lickers

Description

Lavay Smith and Her Red Hot Skillet Lickers keep adding new elements to their timeless blues-jazz-swing repertoire. The band’s third CD and first in nine years, “Miss Smith to You!”, provides fresh songs for the dance floor, including “Miss Brown to You,” “I’m Not Evil,” and “When the Saints Go Marching In.”

Since 1989, before swing became a national craze, jazz vocal stylist Smith and her band (led by co-founder and keyboardist Chris Siebert) have been making music as sharp and irresistible as her period costumes that recall the pinup girls of the Forties. Two decades later they are still the Bay Area’s hottest swing attraction, steeped in not just the songs but the feel that makes them the real deal. Big, bluesy-voiced Smith has deservedly raked in national attention from network television to NPR, and Johnny Otis proclaims that “she and her band are a breath of fresh air!” Multiple award winners, Smith and her Skillet Lickers present not only the best-dressed but also one of the most exciting shows of East Coast Swing and Lindy Hop dance music, as well as sultry torch songs.

Growing up in Southern California and the Philippines, Smith was influenced early by such singers as by Billie Holiday, Dinah Washington, Bessie Smith, and Esther Phillips. Her CDs have gained attention not only for the music but also the provocative period cover art that doesn’t quite capture Smith’s onstage presence. The band’s second CD, “Everybody’s Talkin’ ’Bout Miss Thing!”, received a 4.5-star review in Down Beat magazine and spent 20 weeks on the Billboard jazz chart.
http://www.lavaysmith.com