Jazz Articles about Kitty Margolis

Kitty Margolis: Heart and Soul: Live in San Francisco

by Andrew Rowan
June 18, 2005

Kitty Margolis has a solid reputation and an enthusiastic fan base, and this recording shows why. A rock-solid singer with great chops, Margolis ranges through the Great American Songbook, throwing in a couple of curves on this live session. In her notes, Margolis states that improvisation is at the core of her art. The air of spontaneity comes across in this setting and it is invigorating. The scat chorus on “Summertime lifts it above many of the ...

Kitty Margolis: Heart and Soul: Live in San Francisco

by Rich Friedman
February 11, 2004

Wow, this woman can sing. Recorded live on her home turf, Kitty Margolis’ fifth disc, Heart and Soul: Live in San Francisco , skillfully whips her audience into an appreciative frenzy, and most of the excitement carries over to those listening to the disc. Live recordings tend to be either very good or bad—make a mistake on stage, and it’s impossible to patch over it in the recording studio. This disc is good—very good. Margolis writes in the ...

Kitty Margolis: Evolution

by William Grim
July 14, 2002

This is an amazing album. There are few jazz singers with the range of expression of Kitty Margolis, a singer equally at home in bop, blues and ballads. Possessed of unerring pitch and flawless enunciation, Margolis can also scat with the best of them. Indeed, her versatility brings to mind Ella Fitzgerald and Carmen McRae. In this album we hear Kitty Margolis in almost every style imaginable.

Margolis begins bop anthem “Anthropology” unaccompanied and at a breakneck speed ...

Kitty Margolis and Life on the Road Less Traveled

by Mathew Bahl
December 1, 2001

The difficulty in writing about a genuinely original jazz musician is vocabulary. The old labels, those shorthand phrases jazz writers use to categorize everything, don't really apply.So what word do we use to describe Kitty Margolis? The San Francisco based vocalist does not sound quite like any other jazz singer past or present. One might be tempted to describe her work as 'groundbreaking,' and in many respects it is, but that label misses how much of her work ...

Kitty Margolis: Left Coast Life

by Jim Santella
December 1, 2001

Jazz has a long history in San Francisco. Kitty Margolis, who grew up hangin' at the Keystone Korner, sings about the people who make the Golden Gate city unique. Settled by the Spanish centuries ago and shaken unequivocally by the Gold Rush of 1849, the city has harbored all kinds of people. The last 50 years have seen radical changes that affected its music dramatically. The singer's program allows her to demonstrate the wide variety that exists in San Francisco ...

Kitty Margolis: Left Coast Life

by Dave Nathan
November 1, 2001

If the major purposes - - or at least some of them - - of a jazz singer are to inject a fresh breath into standards and to make sense of newer material, then San Francisco singer Kitty Margolis sits at the top of the class for achieving these noble goals. The West Coast vocalist is well known for her insightful interpretations of standard and pop material, a reputation she solidly established with her previous three releases for her Mad-Kat ...