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Jill Tracy | |
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Background information | |
Genres | Contemporary classical, gothic rock, dark cabaret, alternative rock, dark ambient |
Occupation(s) | singer-songwriter, composer, pianist, storyteller, writer |
Instrument(s) | piano, voice |
Years active | 1995–present |
Website | www.JILLTRACY.com |
Jill Tracy is a composer, singer, pianist, storyteller and "musical evocateur" based in San Francisco. [1]
Jill Tracy is listed in San Francisco Magazine's Top 100 Creative Forces in the Bay Area, has been awarded "Best of the Bay" by the San Francisco Bay Guardian , and has been nominated for two California Music Awards and SF Weekly Music Awards.
She has been hailed a "bad-ass icon" by SFist [2] and "a femme fatale for the thinking man" by the San Francisco Chronicle , which is a moniker that is now frequently used to describe her. [3]
Following her 1996 solo debut CD Quintessentially Unreal, Tracy released Diabolical Streak (1999), her first studio album featuring The Malcontent Orchestra. The song "Evil Night Together" was awarded the SIBL international Grand Prize for songwriting. The album was listed among the "Top 10 Neo-Cabaret albums of all time" in Shift magazine. "Evil Night Together" has been featured on the CBS show NCIS, the feature film "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" (2008), [4] and Showtime chose the tune to promote the final season of Dexter (2013) in a promo entitled "The Final Symphony." [5]
"The Fine Art of Poisoning," also from Diabolical Streak, became an animated short film in 2003, a collaboration with Bay Area animator Bill Domonkos. "The Fine Art of Poisoning" has garnered film festival awards internationally, including Best Experimental Film in the 2003 New Orleans Film Festival and the 2003 Empire Film Festival in Buffalo, NY, as well as Best Music Video in both the 2003 Cineme – Chicago International Animation Festival and the Seattle International Film Festival. [6]
FEARnet licensed "The Fine Art of Poisoning" in 2012 as part of their permanent short film collection. [7]
Jill Tracy and The Malcontent Orchestra's original score to F.W. Murnau’s 1922 silent vampire classic Nosferatu debuted live at San Francisco's Foreign Cinema in 1999 and toured Northern California theatres during Halloween season for five consecutive years. This led to the 2002 CD release Into the Land of Phantoms, selections from the Nosferatu score.
Jill Tracy released her fourth album, The Bittersweet Constrain, in 2008, produced by Alex Nahas. The remixed instrumental arrangements were released as a follow-up album, Beneath: the Bittersweet Constrain (2011). The surreal sepia portraits of Jill Tracy on the album are by outsider photographer Michael Garlington. [8] Nature and taxidermy imagery are featured in the album artwork. Photos of Jill Tracy having a tea party in a garden with taxidermied animals, including birds, dogs, a two-headed calf, and a monkey were shot in the backyard of renowned taxidermist and collector Tia Resleure. [9]
From 2000 to 2015, Jill Tracy performed as "Belle of the Ball," headlining the wildly popular Edwardian Ball, an annual lavish costumed event in San Francisco and Los Angeles, drawing thousands of spectators worldwide in homage to artist Edward Gorey. [10]
Since 2015, she has been a headlining performer in the annual Flower Piano Festival, which draws 60,000 people a year to San Francisco Botanical Garden in Golden Gate Park. [11]
She began collaborating and performing with David J (Bauhaus, Love and Rockets) in 2009, releasing two singles in 2010. Accompanying him on piano during live concerts, she developed a post-classical cinematic version of "Bela Lugosi's Dead," and composed a 2-minute solo piano intro which gradually revealed the rhythm of the classic tune as the band joined in. This was released as "Bela Lugosi's Dead (Undead is Forever)" by "David J (with Jill Tracy)" in 2013. "We recorded practically in pitch darkness," Jill says of the session, which was captured live in a single take. "That's why there is such a gorgeous, seductive urgency to the piece: the band could only hear… and feel… and react." [12]
In 2019, she was invited by Bauhaus frontman Peter Murphy to be the opening act for his historical San Francisco and New York City residencies, as well as several of his iconic shows on the Ruby Tour, celebrating 40 Years of Bauhaus (with bassist David J). She got to perform with the band, performing her original piano arrangements on "Bela Lugosi’s Dead," as well as "Who Killed Mr. Moonlight." [13]
Joining forces with the Atlanta-based violinist Paul Mercer in 2007, the two have become revered for their unique traveling show "The Musical Séance," featuring channeled duets on piano and violin. Music is manifested via tales, objects, and treasured artifacts brought in by the audience, their energy, and emotions.
Jill Tracy is known for researching and composing alone at a piano in mysterious locales. Using the history, energy, frequency, resonant tones, and emotion of an environment to uncover spontaneous music. She calls these projects "The Sonic Séance," her own singular approach of "musical excavation" or "sonic archeology." These projects are done both with and without an audience. [14] She has composed music at Victoria, B.C.'s landmark 1890 Craigdarroch Castle, San Francisco Conservatory of Flowers, abandoned asylums, mansions, cemeteries, and has worked with the San Francisco Botanical Garden since 2015 presenting her Sonic Séance live at night to audiences inside the Ancient Redwood Grove and the Garden of Fragrance, among others. [15]
Jill Tracy is the first musician in history to receive a grant from the renowned Mütter Museum in Philadelphia (Francis C. Wood Institute), the nation's foremost collection of medical oddities. She is creating a musical work inspired by the Mütter collection, and her experiences after-dark inside the museum. She spent nights alone composing music amidst the Mütter's vast collection of skeletons and specimens—which include renowned "Siamese Twins" Chang and Eng, Einstein's brain, Harry Eastlack "The Ossified Man," books bound in human skin, and The Mermaid Baby. This in-progress project (which began in 2012) is called "The Teratology Lullabies." [16]
She was invited by San Francisco's historical Presidio Trust to research its archives and tour abandoned military buildings (dating back to 1776) with old records of supernatural occurrence. She interviewed over 50 Presidio employees, revealing their first-hand ghostly encounters spanning decades. This became her acclaimed stage show "Legends of the Presidio Ghosts," which premiered in the famed Presidio Officers Club Ballroom, featuring music composed on-site inspired her discoveries. For the past three years, it has developed into a nighttime lantern walking tour for visitors, as Jill Tracy guides them to the haunted locations, shares their stories, and performs a Sonic Séance live. [17]
The Secret Music of Lily Dale was released in 2022. [18]
Béla Ferenc Dezső Blaskó, known professionally as Bela Lugosi, was a Hungarian–American actor. He was best remembered for portraying Count Dracula in the horror film classic Dracula (1931), Ygor in Son of Frankenstein (1939) and his roles in many other horror films from 1931 through 1956.
Goth is a subculture that began in the United Kingdom during the early 1980s. It was developed by fans of gothic rock, an offshoot of the post-punk music genre. Post-punk artists who anticipated the gothic rock genre and helped develop and shape the subculture include Siouxsie and the Banshees, Bauhaus, the Cure and Joy Division.
Terrence Mitchell "Terry" Riley is an American composer and performing musician best known as a pioneer of the minimalist school of composition. Influenced by jazz and Indian classical music, his work became notable for its innovative use of repetition, tape music techniques, improvisation, and delay systems. His best known works are the 1964 composition In C and the 1969 album A Rainbow in Curved Air, both considered landmarks of minimalism and important influences on experimental music, rock, and contemporary electronic music. Subsequent works such as Shri Camel (1980) explored just intonation.
Bauhaus were an English rock band formed in Northampton in 1978. Known for their dark image and gloomy sound, Bauhaus are one of the pioneers of gothic rock, although they mixed many genres, including dub, glam rock, psychedelia, and funk. The group consisted of Daniel Ash, Peter Murphy, Kevin Haskins (drums) and David J (bass).
Arsenic and Old Lace is a play by American playwright Joseph Kesselring, written in 1939. It has become best known through the 1944 film adaptation starring Cary Grant and directed by Frank Capra.
"Bela Lugosi's Dead" is the debut single by the English post-punk band Bauhaus, released in August 1979 on the Small Wonder label. It is often considered the first gothic rock record.
Bela Lugosi (1882–1956), best known for the original screen portrayal of Bram Stoker's Dracula in 1931, performed in many films during the course of his 39-year film career. He appeared in films made in his native Hungary, Germany and New York before re-locating to Hollywood in 1928. Films are listed in order of release.
Love at First Bite is a 1979 American comedy horror film directed by Stan Dragoti and written by Robert Kaufman, using characters originally created by Bram Stoker. It stars George Hamilton, Susan Saint James, Richard Benjamin, and Arte Johnson.
The Black Cat is a 1934 American pre-Code horror film directed by Edgar G. Ulmer and starring Boris Karloff and Béla Lugosi. It was Universal Pictures' biggest box office hit of the year, and was the first of eight films to feature both Karloff and Lugosi. In 1941, Lugosi appeared in a comedy horror mystery film with the same title, which was also named after and ostensibly "suggested by" Edgar Allan Poe's short story.
David John Haskins, better known as David J, is a British alternative rock musician, producer, and writer. He is the bassist for the gothic rock band Bauhaus and for Love and Rockets.
The Invisible Ray is a 1936 American science-fiction horror film directed by Lambert Hillyer. It stars Boris Karloff as Dr. Janos Rukh, a scientist who comes in contact with a meteorite composed of an element known as "Radium X". After exposure to its rays begins to make him glow in the dark, his touch becomes deadly, and he begins to be slowly driven mad. Alongside Karloff, the film's cast includes Bela Lugosi, Frances Drake, Frank Lawton, Walter Kingsford, Beulah Bondi, Violet Kemble Cooper, and Nydia Westman.
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is a 1920 American silent horror film produced by Famous Players–Lasky and released through Paramount/Artcraft. The film, which stars John Barrymore, is an adaptation of the 1886 novella Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson. John S. Robertson directed the production, and Clara Beranger wrote the screenplay, based on the 1887 stage play by Thomas Russell Sullivan that in turn was based on the novel.
John Mackey is an American composer of contemporary classical music, with an emphasis on music for wind band, as well as orchestra. For several years, he focused on music for modern dance and ballet.
"If I Was Your Vampire" is a song by American rock band Marilyn Manson. It is the first track on the album Eat Me, Drink Me. Marilyn Manson wrote the song on Christmas Day in 2006. The song was uploaded to Manson's MySpace on April 16, 2007 and was officially released on June 5, 2007 on the album.
Small Wonder Records was a British independent record label owned and managed by Pete and Mari Stennett, that specialised in releasing records by punk rock and post-punk bands. It operated out of a record shop of the same name at 162 Hoe Street, Walthamstow, London. Artists to have released on the label include Bauhaus, Crass, The Cure, The Cravats, Patrik Fitzgerald, Puncture, Cockney Rejects, The Carpettes, Poison Girls and Angelic Upstarts.
Carroll Borland better known by the stage-spelling Carol Borland, was an American professor, writer, and actress. She is best known for having portrayed Luna, the daughter of Bela Lugosi's character, Count Mora, in Mark of the Vampire, and for creating the iconic look of the female vampire with her waist-length dark hair and Adrian-designed shroud in this film.
Bauhaus 1979–1983 is a compilation album by English post-punk band Bauhaus, released in 1985 by record label Beggars Banquet.
Dracula is a soundtrack performed by the Kronos Quartet, with music composed by Philip Glass, for the 1931 film Dracula.
The Mysterious Mr. Wong is a tongue-in-cheek 1934 mystery film starring Bela Lugosi as a powerful Fu Manchu type criminal mastermind of the Chinatown underworld, and Wallace Ford as a wisecracking reporter. The film is based on Harry Stephen Keeler's 1928 short story "The Strange Adventure of the Twelve Coins of Confucius" one of three stories in Keeler's book Sing Sing Nights. Despite the name of the title character and being directed by William Nigh, it has no relation to Monogram Pictures later Mr Wong film series. The character of Mr. Wong does not appear in the original story.
Prisoners is a 1929 American sound part-talkie film produced by Walter Morosco and directed by William Seiter for First National Pictures. In addition to sequences with audible dialogue or talking sequences, the film features a synchronized musical score and sound effects along with English intertitles. The sound was recorded via the Vitaphone sound-on-disc process. The screenplay was written by Forrest Halsey, based on the novel by Ferenc Molnar. Lee Garmes was the cinematographer.