Domenica "Nikka" Costa is an American singer whose music combines elements of funk, soul, and blues. She also had a career as a child singer starting in the early 1980s. She is the daughter of notable music producer Don Costa and is married to Australian producer/songwriter Justin Stanley.
Pebble To A Pearl - the latest radiant gem by the gifted singer-songwriter and performer Nikka Costa - is far and away her most direct and convincing musical statement yet. If this is Costa's most pleasing album to date - and it clearly is - then it's exactly because the woman singing to us so powerfully has finally found the creative freedom to first and foremost please herself.
For a lifelong soul music lover like Costa, making her album and now having it affiliated with the legendary Stax Records, whose roster included some of the best in soul music like Otis Redding and Isaac Hayes, is the fulfillment of a dream. "How perfect is that?" Costa says with a huge, winning smile. "Stax is the epitome of what I'm about - that was the original, integrated soul music. That's the vibe that moved me about soul music when I was twelve, and it moves me still."
http://www.nikkacosta.com/
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There are some records that manage to span multiple eras of time and various places, in essence creating a new sonic space. New Englanders Bronze Radio Return have done just that on their sophomore album, the gorgeous and varied SHAKE! SHAKE! SHAKE!. Contained within the space between notes and breaths are thousands of miles, and decades of history.
With an arsenal of song sketches in hand, Bronze Radio Return set to work to flesh out each of these songs. Formed in 2008, Bronze Radio Return's line-up took a few years to solidify, though most of the band's members were orbiting each other for years at the Hartt School, one of the country's best schools of music, located in Hartford, Connecticut. For debut Old Time Speaker, the band relocated to Nashville for a two-week period, to, as Henderson puts it "a place we'd never been with a producer we'd never met, and played a bunch of songs we'd never played before." For such an inauspicious set of circumstances, the band managed a solid and well-received debut, and forged a lasting bond with producer Chad Copelin. Old Time Speaker established the band's relentless touring schedule, including an invitation to represent the Connecticut music scene by performing for President Obama at an event in Bridgeport, CT in 2010. Fan favorites "Digital Love" and "Lo-Fi" have been picked up for advertising and television licensing and the album landed on CMJ's Top 200 Album Chart.
http://www.bronzeradioreturn.com/
