Tall Trees In Georgia
‘Tall Trees in Georgia’ is one of Eva’s most haunting performances. In the original live recording, the only accompaniment is Eva herself playing the guitar, lightly brushing the strings in a continuous tremolo. For the orchestral version, strings replace the guitar, and the overlapping sustains and tremolos become a texture of forest murmurs. To complete this picture, in between Eva’s verses composer Christopher Willis imagined two birds, represented by two high penny whistles up above the strings. While the narrator looks back on her life and laments the fact that ‘the sweetest love I ever had I left aside’, the whistles/birds are heard calling to each other in the distance.
Christopher Willis
Of the nine tracks on the new I Can Only Be Me album, eight, including ‘Tall Trees In Georgia’, have been arranged by British composer Christopher Willis. The framework around which Willis has layered his compositions is made up of two of Eva’s studio takes, plus performances from her Blues Alley Jazz Club set of January 1996, the year she died. ‘Eva’s original vocal stems are basic live recordings with limited audio data for restoration,’ says engineer Dan Weinberg, who handled the restoration. ‘So we used a multi-stage process of machine learning, with delicate, almost forensic, editing of sounds — from cymbal bleed to the crockery noise of people eating dinner a few feet away from Eva. Many hours of rendering retained the quality and character of her performance, losing none of the magic.’
London Symphony Orchestra
The AI and machine learning technology involved in isolating Eva’s voice is similar to that used on the recent The Beatles: Get Back documentary and Revolver album reissue. But Willis soon discovered that the process is more organic than it sounds. ‘The phrase AI almost implies that we fed it into a machine and it just came out the other end,’ he says. ‘But there’s a lot of human involvement. It is more art than science — like restoring a painting.’
Eva At Blues Alley
For Willis, working so intimately with her legacy, Eva’s spiritual power has been inescapable. ‘She seems to be thinking about the big questions when she’s singing,’ he says. ‘And orchestral arrangements have a tendency to dwell on that. The result is unavoidably ethereal, feeling Eva’s presence from beyond time and space. This effect wasn’t intentional, it happened on its own.’
With ‘Tall Trees In Georgia’, the meeting of the London Symphony Orchestra and Eva Cassidy is at its most hypnotic. With lush soundscapes and pristine vocals in perfect equilibrium — what Willis calls ‘matching the contour of what she did’ — Eva’s artistry and gift for the numinous attain new heights.
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