PREMIERE: Eva Cassidy & London Symphony Orchestra "Tall Trees in Georgia"

Eva Cassidy with the London Symphony Orchestra "Tall Trees in Georgia" from the album "I Can Only Be Me"
Premiere - March 3, 2023

The enduring power of Cassidy's voice, over a quarter of a century after the singer's death at the age of just 33, is one of the greatest and most unexpected successes in the music industry. Next year, when Eva would have celebrated her 60th birthday, the album "I Can Only Be Me" will be released, featuring Cassidy's voice combined with the London Symphony Orchestra. Two previously released tracks suggest a completely new audience awaits her - Laura Barton, December 2022.

Eva Cassidy tells an emotional story of love and loss, which, thanks to the London Symphony Orchestra, becomes a captivating, mesmerizing experience for listeners. "Tall Trees In Georgia" is the third track released from Eva Cassidy's groundbreaking orchestral album, "I Can Only Be Me", which will be released on March 3.

"Tall Trees in Georgia" is one of Eva's most moving performances.

In the original live recording, the only accompaniment is Eva herself playing the guitar, lightly strumming the strings in a continuous tremolo. In the orchestral version, the guitar is replaced by strings, and the overlapping long notes and tremolos become a texture of forest rustles. To complete this picture, between Eva's verses, I imagined two birds, represented by two flutes above the strings. While the narrator looks back on her life and laments the fact that the sweetest love I ever had, I pushed aside, the flutes/birds can be heard in the distance, calling to each other" - arranger Christopher Willis

Of the nine tracks on the new album, eight, including "Tall Trees In Georgia", were arranged by British composer Christopher Willis. The backbone around which Willis composed his arrangements consists of two studio recordings by Eva plus recordings from her concert at the Blues Alley Jazz Club in January 1996, the year of her death. "Eva's original vocal tracks are simple live recordings with limited audio data for restoration" - says engineer Dan Weinberg, who was in charge of the restoration process. "So we applied a multi-stage machine learning process, with delicate, almost laboratory-like, sound editing - eliminating, for example, the sounds of people eating lunch several meters away from Eva. Many hours of rendering preserved the quality and character of her performance, without losing any of the magic".

The artificial intelligence and machine learning technology involved in extracting Eva's voice is similar to that used in the recent documentary film "The Beatles: Get Back" and in the reissue of the album "Revolver". However, Willis quickly discovered that this process is more organic than it seems. "The term artificial intelligence almost suggests that we put Eva into a machine, like Metal Micky, and she just came out the other end" - he says. "But there is a lot of human involvement in this. It's more art than science - like restoring a painting".

For Willis, working so closely with her legacy, Eva's spiritual strength was unavoidable. "It seems that when she sings, she thinks about great things" - he says. "And the orchestral arrangements amplify that feeling. The result is inevitably ethereal, you can feel Eva's presence transcending time and space. This effect was not intentional, it appeared on its own".

The album "I Can Only Be Me" will be released on March 3.




Tracklist:

1. Songbird
2. Autumn Leaves
3. People Get Ready
4. Waly Waly
5. Time After Time
6. Tall Trees In Georgia
7. Ain't No Sunshine
8. You've Changed
9. I Can Only Be Me