Your Requests

Description

Laila Biali presents her 3rd album, as a return to the fundamentals!
"Your Requests," the third album by Laila Biali on ACT, shows a very different facet of the Canadian pianist/singer's art compared to its predecessors. Her self-titled debut album, which won the Canadian Juno Award for Best Vocal Jazz Album in 2019, and its successor, "Out of Dust" (nominated for the award in 2021), both highlighted the range, depth, and quality of the pianist/singer/conductor's writing. Today, for the first time in ten years, the Toronto artist and her band return to jazz standards by revisiting songs from the Great American Songbook, including classics by Gershwin, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Rodgers and Hart, and Jerome Kern. For "Your Requests," she has also gathered a beautiful list of guests - not only singers Kurt Elling and her fellow JUNO winners Emilie-Claire Barlow and Caity Gyorgy, but also dazzling instrumentalists: clarinetist Anat Cohen, harmonica master Grégoire Maret, Brazilian percussionist Maninho Costa, and Hammond B3 organist Sam Yahel. Biali's regular collaborators form the core of the band: drummers Larnell Lewis (Snarky Puppy) and Ben Wittman, bassist George Koller, and saxophonist Kelly Jefferson.