Electric Earth Concerts: Indra Jazz Trio

Electric Earth Concerts opens their 2016 season with a concert by Indra Jazz Trio.

Electric Earth Concerts is delighted to present Indra, the jazz-folk-traditional trio that showcases the stellar vocal talent of singer Indra Rios-Moore. The concert opens the 2016 season for Electric Earth and is being held on Sunday, January 24, at 4:00 p.m., in Bass Hall at the Monadnock Center for History and Culture in Peterborough.

Indra Jazz Trio

After winning the Danish Music Award, the highest national recognition in Denmark, Indra relocated to the U.S. a few years ago. Along with saxophonist-husband Benjamin Traerup and bassist Thomas Sejthen, Indra brings a heartfelt and freely personal approach that travels from gospel, blues, and old-time music to David Bowie and Duke Ellington.

The band’s diverse repertoire is unified by a warm, intimate, acoustic sound. It is soulful and sparse, but also sophisticated and jazzy. Indra peels off the layers of time and distance from the songs and brings them back into a warm, expressive center. An example is the band’s interpretation of David Bowie’s song “Heroes” that is transformed into a slow, glowing ballad, with Benjamin Traerup’s spiraling saxophone and an earthy rhythm section. The song becomes a narrative of sadness, beauty, and redemption.

Named by her mother after the Hindu warrior deity of the sky and the rain, New York–born singer Indra Rios-Moore has been on a musical journey since childhood, when her mother filled the house with music from an extensive record collection of jazz, soul, and rock. At the age of thirteen she started studies at Mannes College of Music Preparatory Division, and also attended Village Harmony, a music summer camp based in northern Vermont. Over the course of her teen years she lived two parallel musical lives: one full of classical arias and vocal practice and the other full of traditional American folks tunes and old Balkan folk songs, with time to run around the woods of Vermont.

In the notes to her latest album, “Heartland,” Indra explains that music has always been a sanctuary and the act of singing has kept her moving into an emotional space “where the mind doesn’t interfere.” The space is inhabited by songs that have meant a lot to the singer. Indra concludes, “These are all songs that traverse the territories of the heart. They are tunes that helped me . . . in the middle of the whirlwind of life.”

Tickets are $25, and available at the Electric Earth website

Watch and listen: