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<<Eva Cassidy
Eva Cassidy
 The Washington Post said "she could sing anything-folk, blues, pop, jazz, R&B, gospel-and make it sound like it was the only music that mattered," which may explain why the Washington Area Music Awards honored her as Best Female Vocalist in four separate categories: blues, jazz-contemporary, jazz-traditional and roots rock/traditional R&B. Grammy-winning music writer Joel E. Siegel called Eva "one of the greatest voices of her generation," and states that her music "is the treasure she has bequeathed to us. (It) commemorates an extraordinary spirit and marks the beginning of an inspiring musical legend." Three years following her death of melanoma at age 33, it appears this high praise was prophetic and, perhaps, understated.
Though almost painfully shy and with virtually no pretentions to stardom, singer Eva Cassidy still made a huge impact on the music scene in her native Washington, DC. She possessed an "aw shucks" attitude toward her own talent, but others, whose lives she touched with her voice, were awestruck: people like her producer and friend Chris Biondo, musical partners like Chuck Brown, friend and supporter Mick Fleetwood (he booked her into Fleetwood's, his Washington nightclub of the time) DC-area critics and music lovers, even Blue Note Records President and longtime music industry veteran Bruce Lundvall, who stated that "Eva Cassidy had the most extraordinary and singular voice I had heard in a very, very long time, distinctive not only for its power but because of its timbre when she sang quietly. It was so very mysteriousit would just freeze me."
Cassidy died of melanoma at the premature age of 33 in November of 1996, leaving behind grieving family and music lovers, but not before also leaving behind a scant few recordings of her one-of-a-kind voice.
Growing up in a musical family, Cassidy began singing at age nine. Her father played acoustic bass, her brother fiddle. She sang with couple rock bands in high school, and did a little country singing one early summer. Eventually, a friend brought her to Biondo's studio and Biondo was blown away by her forceful voice.
Though demure in front of audiences, she ventured into local clubs and began warming to performing live when she started realizing that her singing touched and affected people. Musical insiders say that Eva Cassidy was on the verge of breaking through to a national audience at the time of her death. Less than threee weeks after her passing, her locally-released live recording, Live At Blues Alley, was honored by the Washington Area Music Association (WAMA) with nine WAMMIES, including the overall Artist of the Year and Album of the Year awards. Cassidy was also inducted into the WAMA Hall of Fame, which was, according to the Washington Post, "a gesture inspired more by sentiment than by any actual fame garnered by the sadly under-noticed Cassidy."
In April of 1998, Los Angeles-based Blix Street Records released Songbird, a posthumous album that featured tracks from Live At Blues Alley and Eva by Heart (a studio album released locally in the D.C. area in late 1997), along with Eva's re-defining version of "Over the Rainbow" from The Other Side (Eva's 1992 duet album with Chuck Brown). Following Songbird, Blix Street released Live At Blues Alley and Eva by Heart, the first national exposure for both albums. Songbird made a number of noted music critics' year-end Top Ten lists in 1998, earned Record of the Year honors on England's BBC Radio 2 and galvanized a growing international audience for Eva's powerful, warm and inimitable voice.
Now Blix Street is releasing Time After Time, a new posthumous collection of previously-unreleased songs from the now-legendary Eva Cassidy. Time After Time, like Songbird, is an eclectic selection of contemporary songs and timeless standards and will, undoubtedly, enhance the growing legend of a singer who tragically didn't live to personally share her music with fans from all over the world. But Eva Cassidy's unique recorded legacy lives on, proving the immortality of of great music.
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