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MP3 Jeffrey James Harvey - Dance Through Life
16 MP3 Songs
WORLD: World Fusion, NEW AGE: New Age
Details:
Greetings fellow music aficionados. I’m in my mid-forties, a native Floridian, and have lived in the Philadelphia, PA area since 1985. I’m a “career musician” at heart, but work full-time in another industry like many artists. I’ve been continually involved with a variety of solid music projects over the years as both performer and producer; I have served as lead vocalist, percussionist & saxophonist for numerous bands and professional groups. I’m also an accomplished Disc Jockey and have been providing music to weddings, parties and corporate events for almost 20 years.
I developed a passion for singing at a young age and simply love harmony and background vocals. I’ve had the fortune of being hired as a vocalist for many local recording projects, both musical and industrial. After years of being involved with a variety of commercial projects, I decided, finally, to press my own finished product, commercially viable or not. This accomplishment was truly a labor of love.
Knowing that life can change in an instant, I decided to press “Dance Through Life” as a “last wish” so to speak. I most certainly hope to live a long and productive life, but if I never have an opportunity to release a collection of recorded works again, then I hope to be remembered for this one, and that it reflects my authentic love and respect for many kinds of cultural music and my passion for performing it.
“Dance Through Life” is a collection of mostly a cappella and percussion-driven works in which I’m singing all the vocal parts and performing all the percussion & indigenous flutes (I utilized a few other marvelous musicians in places). There is a large palette of influences here including 70’s R & B and pop, traditional African and pre-Colombian music, gospel, jazz, rock and folk. “Dance Through Life” features renditions of a few classic R&B tracks and other personal favorites, balanced with my own compositions. Overall, it is a well-produced, organic effort. Some of my friends and associates have called it a unique and timeless work.
You wouldn’t really know it from listening, but this album took me nearly 15 years to complete. I managed to work on it when I either had enough money to fund the recording sessions myself or when I had accumulated enough barter time with area producers/ engineers in trade for doing vocal or percussion sessions for them.
Having chosen to record mostly everything myself, there were indeed sessions that yielded little results. I was occasionally dissatisfied with the parts and would have to return to re-cut them. There were times when I just had to let a track lay dormant for a while, and then only months later, I’d get to work on it again. And since I never had an ongoing budget, some of these tracks took an average of a year to complete from start to finish.
To offer a little perspective on time, I was working on a track the night the Gulf War began in January of 1987, and I was recording another (“Spring of Wisdom”) the very night of September 11, 2001. I worked in a half-dozen studios with 4 different engineers and numerous assistants over the years. Three of the studios in which I recorded were in buildings that have since been demolished to make way for new business centers, and one home-based studio dismantled when the owner’s house went up for sale as a result of divorce.
Many of these tracks were born on a borrowed 4-track recorder that I practiced with in my bedroom for nearly a year before I took the project into a professional recording environment. The productions range from analog 16-track, 24-track, early hard-disc recording to current digital technologies. The songs were cut one vocal part at a time (just me, the engineer and a microphone). Only 5 of the 16 tracks involved any sampling, and there was no pitch correction used on any of the vocals anywhere.
When I listen to the finished work, there are two things that stand out to me the most: first, the depth of the arrangements, and second, the continuity of the tracks. I would have thought that combining so many productions over the years would sound very disjointed, but serendipitously it doesn’t. (Of course, my decision to employ an excellent mastering lab at the end really helped sonically, and the nature of my approach with voice & percussion at the root is more forgiving versus a production with a slew of dated drum machine sounds, which would be a dead giveaway.) At the end of it all, this amounted to be a fairly monumental work for one singer. The arrangements have an imagination that, if it wasn’t for the passage of time in which I was engaged in this project, they probably would not have been captured this way. “Dance Through Life” was most certainly an exercise in patience.
I’m still singing and performing wherever I can, and I’m involved with other recording projects. But the heart of who I am is really reflected in this album. I’d like to do something like this again, but after the 15 years this one required, it’s a little tough deciding just where to start. Time will tell. Meanwhile, if you take a chance on buying this, I sincerely hope you enjoy it. Please write me and let me know. And if you’re not doing it already, start dancing through life!
Peace, Jeffrey
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