Old Soul, Young Talent
A twenty-year-old isn’t supposed to be able to sing like this. A voice so thick with soul invokes images of a life lived hard, maybe somewhere on the Mississippi Delta, or of a smoke-filled, dimly-lit jazz club from a generation gone by, but probably not of a young woman from the suburbs of Portland, OR, in 2006.
But Kristina Rae does sing like this, and she does it so naturally and honestly that after one listen you might think you are sitting at the bar of that dark, smoke-filled club, the kind where a guy like Miles Davis might just drop by to sit in with the band. The list of her influences is long, and begins with names like Ray, Otis, Etta, Billie, Aretha, Ella and Stevie, all of whom she started to discover at the early age of five. It wasn’t long before she had worn out the grooves on her parent’s vinyl collection, singing along, word-for-word, note-for-note, burning those songs into her bones. But it was more than just the songs - it was the nuances, the emotion, the phrasing, the way these soul pioneers transported her to a different place through their music, the way their voices carried her as if on wings, and the way they all told her the same thing, over and over and over:
“This is what you have to do.†And so she does.
Kristina was on the stage by the time she was only six. In the fourteen years since, she has become a veteran of the Portland Blues Festival. She was invited to sing on the “Muddy†Award-Winning “Northwest Ray Charles Tributeâ€, alongside such Northwest blues greats as Sweet Baby James Benton and Linda Hornbuckle. She has recorded her own full length album, and has appeared as a special guest on too many to count. She has, one could say, accomplished a career’s-worth, and she’s only warming up.
No, a twenty-year-old isn’t supposed to be able to sing like this. Lucky for us, this one does.
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