“Be A Child” by Kela Parker

Kela Parker’s The Dreamer & The Dream was composed 2013-2016, and recorded between 2016-2017 in her bedroom in Portland, OR, and at a church in Brooklyn, NY, where her vintage grand piano lives. She describes the album as a collection of songs about the sense of ongoing change in human experience, with the increasingly volatile disruptions and shifts of the natural world’s ecological balance as its backdrop. From within the tumult, a fresh harmony emerges, a new-fangled account of being an evolving self in a changing place. Speaking to and through the authentic human instrument, Kela Parker soundtracks rhythms of a post-genre new world.

Like her unusual chord progressions, singer, composer and multi-instrumentalist Kela Parker followed a winding, serpentine path to arrive at her distinct sound. Growing up in a family of classical and folk players, as a young musician she gravitated equally to Joni Mitchell’s alternate guitar tunings as to the dramatic piano progressions of Rachmaninoff and Chopin.

Drawing from a well that reaches deep into the musical past and into her own emotional journey, her hidden harmonics and oral narrations pulse with the dissonance of artistry amidst modern world industry. Pivoting between the ultimate individualism and the shared universal rhythm, Parker creates an accidental kind of jazz, one’s personal improvisation of the world’s collective folk step.

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