Moy Eng & Wayne Wallace Bring THE BLUE HOUR PROJECT To Monterey Jazz Festival

Vocalist, poet and lyricist Moy Eng brings The Blue Hour Project, featuring her powerful and deeply felt musical storytelling, to the Monterey Jazz Festival on Saturday, September 24.

Joining Eng is a 9-piece band featuring Grammy-nominated trombonist and bandleader Wayne Wallace, who serves as her producer and songwriting partner. The performance, which features music from Eng's 2019 debut The Blue Hour, takes place from 12:30 - 1:30 on the West End Stage. For more information, go to https://montereyjazzfestival.org/blog/artistinfo/moy-eng/

Traversing themes related to love, loss, travel, and identity, Eng presents her songs as a colorful basket of individual gifts, each wrapped in a gently sumptuous and frankly beautiful alto - a silky but unruffled singing voice as warmly clear as the poetic voice that infuses her writing. To complement her words, Wallace's compositions - and especially his spot-on arrangements which draw on his eclectic musical experiences in pop, rock, jazz, and Latin music - enhance each of Eng's lyrics, underscoring emotions both spoken and implied. Joining Eng and Wallace are a stellar band including Frank Martin, keyboards; Deszon Claiborne, drums; David Belove, bass; Rick Vandivier, guitar; Michaelle Goerlitz, percussion; John Worley, Jr., trumpetl and Mary Fettig, reeds.

Eng first encountered Wallace more than a decade ago, when she enrolled in a songwriting class he was teaching at a Bay Area music camp. "I wanted to learn what made a great song, even if I were never to write one. I felt that some of the phrasing and imagery in my poems might work as songs. And Wayne was very encouraging," she recounts. About a year later, Eng called to tell Wallace that she'd written close to 100 pieces of poetry, and asking if they might try writing a song together. His reaction? "I was wondering when you would call me." Eng sent him close to a dozen poems. Wallace chose three of those as likely candidates, and in 2010 they got to work on their first song, "Alpha Girl," drawn from Eng's X-ray observations of "post-feminist women with the ambitious goal to be all things to all people."

In addition to her performance life, Eng serves as the CEO of Community Arts Stabilization Trust (CAST), Bay Area's Community Arts Stabilization Trust (CAST), a living laboratory that creates permanent, affordable space for artists, creative entrepreneurs, and arts and culture organizations in one of the most expensive regions to live and work in the United States. Using financing and structural models in new ways, CAST makes and stewards spaces to secure the cultural soul of the San Francisco Bay Area, for now and for future generations. The organization acquired and opened four cultural centers in San Francisco over the past eight years and has inspired CAST-like efforts in Austin, Boston, London, and Seattle, among others. She has earned honors from the California Arts Council and from the World Affairs Council, which called her a social entrepreneur "who will shape our tomorrow."

Wayne Wallace is perhaps best known as a powerful trombone soloist with expertise in a startling range of Afro-Caribbean and South American rhythms, as displayed in his eponymous Latin Jazz Quintet. A San Francisco native, Wallace comes from a strong foundation forged in San Francisco's pop, soul, and Latin music scenes of the 1970s and 80s - one of his first gigs placed him in a James Brown cover band - and as a coveted writer and producer. The stylistic variety of his work on The Blue Hour offers a glimpse into this extensive resume. Wallace has lent his myriad talents (sideman, arranger, composer, producer) to the likes of Count Basie, Aretha Franklin, Tito Puente, Sonny Rollins, and Carlos Santana. A gifted educator, Wallace now spends the academic year as professor of jazz trombone and practice in jazz studies at the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University, having previously taught at San Jose State University and Stanford University.

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