Biography

PIANIST, VOCALIST, SONGWRITTER, PERFORMER AND MUSIC TEACHER OF ACADIAN ORIGIN, NATHALIE RENAULT invites you to the frontiers of jazz, pop and enchantment… POP-JAZZ OR JAZZ POP???

When and how was Nathalie Renault’s style defined?

Wouldn’t she – or anyone else – have simply realized that what she was doing, quite naturally, was a combination of both genres – jazz with a popular flavor, or jazz-tinged pop?

In the end, it doesn’t matter. No matter what you call her music, Nathalie is stronger than any classification. She is an artist – and the rest, as they say, is literature.

Nathalie is a jewel of our musical heritage. With a university certificate in jazz and a Bachelor of Music degree, the pianist-singer from Campbellton, NB, has toured Quebec, New Brunswick and Europe in recent years. She has shared the stage with Daniel Bélanger, Yann Perreau, Jim Corcoran, Zachary Richard, Nanette Workman, Pierre Flynn, Philippe LaFontaine, Karen Young and Claude Léveillé, among others.

With her heart close to jazz and pop songs, Nathalie proves conclusively that successfully marrying different musical genres is a matter of mastery and vocation. And it shows: a brilliant melodic construction, a touching interpretation and an exceptional voice, warm and powerful. She surely will never cease to amaze us!

Her inseparable companion is the piano, of which she seems to know all the subtleties. To say that she accompanies herself on the piano would not do justice to the intimacy, the complicity that exists between the instrument and the voice. She interprets her songs with her voice and the piano.

This is quite right; and one could say just as rightly that she uses the piano as a second voice. She plays the voice, sings the piano, blends the two together in an expressive counterpoint. Whether she is stroking the text or performing a scat, she knows how to use subtleties of phrasing, timbre inflections, and variations in volume to enrich the musicality of her performance.

At the same time, her fluid fingers run over the keyboard, drawing out sensuality, gaiety and audacity from the taut strings, and the piano itself becomes, as much as the voice, a carrier of emotion. It is in turn sensual, melancholic, show-off, playful. It laughs, it banters, it cries. It has silences, hesitations, poignant quarter-sighs, as if this great piece of sound furniture had a lump in its throat at times.

Nathalie Renault is usually accompanied by a jazz bassist and a drummer, but she also performs as a soloist, a duo and a quartet.

When she is not writing her own lyrics, Nathalie chooses her lyricists wisely (France Bonneau, Jules Boudreau, Patrick Gonzàles) or she selects from among what they suggest things that are similar to her. Her choices show a great lucidity, a touching vulnerability. The music is all signed by her.

Less than two years after her solo album Live at the Jazzhaus Freiburg, Germany in 2000, Nathalie Renault releases Creuser des Océans in which she continues her adventure in vocal jazz. The singer and musician produced and directed this second album herself.

The emphasis is more on the exploration of sounds than on the melody as it is often the case in vocal jazz. However, some melodies are catchy: La faiseuse de chansons, of course, but also Le Blues à Fred and Liberté.

What remains after listening to the record is the climate born of the fusion of words, the intonations of the voice, the colors of the instruments, this vocal game in which words and scat intermingle as in Par en-dedans. The whole becomes a hymn to life without ever trying to conceal the hardships.

Nathalie Renault, this songmaker, is a girl of songs and, as she admits herself in Chanter, there is “nothing that ‘makes’ her more beautiful” to herself and to us.

The adventure continues in 2009 with a third album under the sign and title of La Chance directed by Charles Papsoff (Best Director at the Adisq, 2004). A voice that shines, that has fun with words and sounds, that lets itself go to joyful scats relayed by a piano always as lively and precise. And a well-balanced orchestra that supports the melodic line with diversified arrangements signed by Papasoff and Nathalie. This album is described as a bouquet of multicolored pop-jazz perennials! Several renowned artists are involved, such as Sylvain Provost, Coral Egan, Papasoff, Kevin Dean, Richard Gagnon, Guillaume Bourque…

On record, Nathalie is superb, but it is in front of an audience, and especially in a small room, that one can really appreciate her talent and the warmth of her interpretation. The contact is made, the communication is established, and each listener has the feeling that she sings for him, or for her. She tells our fleeting happinesses, our anxieties, our disappointments, our pitfalls, and she reassures us that at the end of it all, there is life. Nathalie Renault is a living being.

What makes her interpretation endearing is her apparent fragility. It is a fragility that hides a tenacious will, an unusual strength of character. The production of her record, which she took on herself, required a colossal amount of work on her part. She had to call upon all her resources to bring this project to fruition. Through it all, she has kept her vulnerability intact.

On stage, she is beautiful, resplendent. Perhaps it is the grain of her skin that is particularly favored by the light of the projectors. Or maybe it’s that beautiful emotion that radiates from within.

Reflections by Jules Boudreau and David Lonergan