Anna Rodriguez

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There is a lot about my own personal bio on my other page http://www.myspace.com/annajazzsinger, but there is a lot more to it than that.
These songs were taped in Israel in 1999 and 2001 (I think!); this is some of the music I was doing at the time. I didn't have a live band, it was all playbacks, although I did have a pianist (Sergio Barcala) and a backing singer (Violeta Russo) that would perform with me. The show was based on latin rhythms, I would sing salsa, latin pop, bossanova, pop...anything and everything I felt Israelis wanted to hear...I would sing at restaurants, bar mitzvahs, weddings, pubs, clubs...wherever I could. I just wanted to sing; it was fun at first but it became frustrating and stopped being fun after a few years. I would sing and dance nonstop for 3 hours, and the aim of the show was to make people dance. This was hard, hard work, I would get home exhausted and the next day I would hardly have a voice left...and then I would have to go and work at my "real" job answering the phone non-stop for nine hours straight. The problem is that there is only so much you can do with playbacks, and in spite of my many attempts to get musicians to form a jazz band there was just no way. "Jazz lo holech po" (Jazz doesn't go down here) is what they would say to me. They never even gave me a chance to sing for them...Finally I was lucky to get someone to listen to me...and that someone turned out to be Arnon Palty (teaches bass guitar in Rimon School of Jazz and Contemperary Music)in 2001 and what was meant to be a jazz band turned into a blues band. We played at "Mike's Place" quite a bit, with Gil Ladin on drums, Steve Peskoff and Amos Ever-Hadani on guitar (all teachers at Rimon). That was good fun too, but still my desire to sing jazz was frustrated once again. At least I was singing with a live band though...and with some of the best musicians in Israel! Apart from all of this I collaborated with other bands every so often (mostly salsa bands) and did some backing singing for Laila Malcos. All this taught me a lot about what I wanted (and didn't want) to do in the future.
When I got to Tenerife after seven years of living in Israel I started singing jazz...see more in my new myspace page www.myspace.com/annajazzsinger