India.arie meets Joni Mitchell: Food for the Neo-Soul.

2 MP3 Songs
URBAN/R&B: Soul, FOLK: like Joni



Details:
Jenika Eve has followed a circuitous path to discover and develop her unique voice. The daughter of a gifted guitarist and blues singer, she was classically trained as a voclist. She fell in love with blue notes the librettos lacked, however, and explored a growing love of jazz and blues by studying with the legendary Cab Calloway's daughter.

She moved to the Los Angeles area to try her hand in more contemporary music and studied Speech Level Singing with Seth Riggs' right-hand man, Dave Stroud. There she met songwriter and producer Rob Seals. The two began writing songs together, fusing Jenika's jazz and blues-inflected phrasing with Rob's inventive acoustic guitar style. In a year's time the two had written a complete album's worth of material.

Seals brought in Billy Hawn (Charlotte Martin, Tristan Prettyman) to play drums and percussion and Vertical Horizon bassist and session ace Sean Hurley (Mya, JoJo, Liz Phair) to anchor the low end. Add Seals' guitar flavor, the Swiss Army roles of Beth Balmer, and the chorus of a million voices of Ruut Demeo, and the two song demo In This was born, produced, engineered, and mixed by Seals.

Jenika Eve is currently rehearsing, shopping for label and backer interest, exploring tv/film licensing of the songs, and making plans to record her first full-length, for a 2007 release