Cyrille Aimée says that her music has thrived since she found a quiet environment in the jungle, but the award-winning jazz singer isn’t talking about a lack of sound.
When she held up her cell phone for a recent video call it wasn’t necessary to see the thick curtain of greenery behind her exuberant tangle of curls to know that she was in a setting teaming with vociferous life. The hum and trill of insects and birds accompanied a conversation that started with her explanation of how she ended up living in a fairly remote part of Costa Rica’s central Pacific rain forest.
Her best friend from college is Costa Rican and Aimée has been visiting her there regularly for years. When her buddy got married and moved to the rain forest, Aimée started making regular treks to hang out, “staying longer and longer, often through the New York winter,” she said.
A few months before the pandemic, Aimée bought a plot of land next to her friends’ house, thinking she’d eventually put up a little cabin. But hunkered down in the jungle throughout 2020 and 2021, she designed and built herself a house.
“I did everything,” said Aimée, 38, who was born and raised in France and also grew up speaking Spanish due to her Dominican mother.
She exchanges Costa Rica for a seven-city West Coast beginning this week that brings her to Stanford’s Bing Studio on Feb. 12, Santa Cruz’s Kuumbwa Jazz Center on Feb. 13 and the SFJAZZ Center’s Joe Henderson Lab Feb. 18-19.
Some of the music she’ll be presenting emerged out of her months in the rain forest, where she shed the hustling mindset required for life in New York and the road. “The jungle is super loud, but one reason I fell in love with it is there’s the silence of no distractions,” she said. “Settling in, I could finally hear what wanted to come out.”
Slated for release later in the year, her new album “Inside and Out” is very different than her previous releases, which feature her mostly with small combos or in duo settings with master guitarists like Diego Figueiredo and Michael Valeanu (her collaborator on 2021’s “I’ll Be Seeing You,” her most recent release).
For her Bay Area gigs Aimée is working with a new set of musicians from Los Angeles, including pianist Sam Hirsch, bassist Max Gerl and drummer Anthony Fung (with Lisbon-born Pedro Segundo taking over the drum chair in San Francisco). “I texted Gerald Clayton for recommendations,” she said, referring to the masterly L.A. pianist.
She’ll be drawing from her expansive repertoire of standards and originals, including a few previews from “Inside and Out,” which features songs she wrote on guitar and baritone ukulele. The project started about five years ago when she was still in Brooklyn, but ended up on the backburner when Aimée moved to New Orleans in 2018. The problem wasn’t that she was having too much fun letting the good times roll.
“I didn’t believe in myself as a songwriter,” she said, noting that her 2019 project “Move On: A Sondheim Adventure” didn’t bolster her songwriting confidence. “It was even harder to go back after that. Then the pandemic hit and I came to the jungle.”
If the Costa Rican rain forest unlocked her muse, Aimée found an ideal creative partner in New York producer Jake Sherman, a pianist with a jazz background who’s worked with artists such as Meshell Ndegeocello, Bilal, Emily King, Blood Orange, and Andrew Bird.
Rather than recording with a band in the studio, she and Sherman painstakingly crafted each track layer by layer. “I’d come in with a fully finished song and play the guitar or baritone uke part. He plays the bass and keys, and figures out if it needs piano, Rhodes, organ, or something else.”
Aimée had already developed a solo act in which she accompanied herself by creating loops in real time on stage. She thinks of music horizontally and Sherman figured out how to tap into that skill set. After they’d flesh out a piece, “he’d have me scat over the whole song,” she said.
“We didn’t keep any scatting on the album, but he’d say, ‘Listen, what you did there, that’s a horn line,’ or ‘That’ll be strings.’ I wrote all the lines without thinking that I’m writing lines.”
As a lyricist, she describes herself as a work in progress who’s more likely to write in French and Spanish than English. Her mother tongues tap into more personal realms, and she’s found that songwriting can be revelatory, or even prophetic.
“The chorus of the title track says, ‘I will build a house so steady for you to come back to,’” she said. “You might write a line that doesn’t make sense now, but in five years it might.”
Contact Andrew Gilbert at jazzscribe@aol.com.
CYRILLE AIMÉE
When & where: 7 p.m. Feb; . 12 at Bing Studio, Stanford University, presented by Stanford Live; $40-$50; live.stanford.edu; 7 p.m. Feb. 13 at Kuumbwa Jazz Center, Santa Cruz; $47.25-$42; www.kuumbwajazz.org; 7 and 8:30 p.m. Feb. 18 and 6 and 7:30 p.m. Feb. 19 at SFJAZZ, San Francisco; $30-$35; www.sfjazz.org.
