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VIVIAN SESSOMS
As separate entities, Vivian Sessoms and Chris Parks have achieved their own monumental successes. Together, however, they are primed and ready to take over the entire world. The dynamic duo met some years ago, with Vivian as a sessions singer when Chris needed someone for a project he was developing. Their affinity for one another was immediately irrepressible. Realizing early that she didn't exactly fit the model most music label reps were looking for, Vivian began the search for her own musical identity. Having grown tired of being told she could be the next Whitney! Mary! Anita Baker!, she knew she wanted to say and be something different. Even though Vivian had grown up listening to these singers, she had also spent many a day listening to the likes of The Beatles, Mother's Finest and Sly and the Family Stone.
Chris too, had grown up steeped in a mixture of R&B, gospel, rock etc.: you name it, he'd heard it. So, when they happened across one another, their destinies seemed to be pre-determined. Sunny One Day, their debut CD made under the moniker Albright (after Vivian's maternal grandmother who had more than a hand in raising her), sounds like Vivian and Chris went into their D.U.M.B.O. studio, SuprDupr, threw a secret recipe of every musical genre listed above, with some country for good story-telling and a hearty dusting of funk into their blender and came up with a fresh sound all their own.
To give a little background info on the two, Vivian was born and raised in Harlem, a fact of which she is acutely aware. I definitely feel that Harlem helped to shape and groom me into the artist I am now. I grew up hearing about how fabulous Harlem was when my grandmother first moved there in the late 40's, Vivian shares. Her mom was a session/jingle-singer and her dad was a percussionist/flautist. She spent plenty of time soaking up music in its various forms, so as naturally as any child raised in a multi-lingual household, she began singing and talking at the same time. And she's not been quiet since. By the age of nine, she was doing voiceovers for radio and television; at sixteen, she was composing her own songs.
Chris was born in Wisconsin but raised in the Bronx (about about 20 minutes from where Vivian grew up). Unlike Vivian, Chris' parents were not musicians, still he was exposed to music at an early age through an uncle, who played upright bass and an older cousin, who played guitar. Chris was learning the acoustic guitar by seven and before long was playing along with Paul Simon, John Denver, Cat Stevens. He rode his musical abilities to a scholarship at Berklee College of Music in Boston, where he met and studied with Kevin Eubanks of The Tonight Show and Lalah Hathaway. Eventually he became Lalah's musical director, which positioned Chris as a formidable player (yes, that pun was unintentional, but worthwhile enough to leave in the bio) in the industry. Since then, he has played for Rashaan Patterson, George Duke, Amel Larrieux and many others. Chris' experimental side brought out Vivian's. They meshed together well and it allowed Vivian to work out her issues with those label reps who kept trying to change her. Vivian says, However ‘out' I wanted to take it musically, Chris would always be down. Sometimes I wasn't sure where I was going, but in the end, we kept being on the same page. Their first collection, the still-unreleased Addicted, was a funk-rock affair, but still it has the influence of both Rufus & Aretha. The problem, says Vivian, is that black women who aren't Tina Turner aren't really getting a lot of chances in the world of rock and roll these days. So that CD sits on the shelves at SuprDupr, waiting for its release to the world.
It's an established fact that both Vivian and Chris are well-rooted in music and that they bring a fresh perspective to the industry. As they've been working on several projects at once (both write and produce, by the way), as creative people often do, they ended up contributing a few songs to Lalah Hathaway, but in general, their main objective has been to work on their own album. After hashing it out for 3 years, and crafting over 40 songs together, eventually they found they had enough material for three CDs, full of stories about love, and loss, about the journey that is life, about the things we should celebrate, about things that are so relatable that everyone can find a song that sounds like it was created for him or her personally. That, my friends, is Sunny One Day.
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