Jill Tracy
Genres glam noir, dark cabaret, post classical, gothic rock
Occupation(s) Singer-songwriter, composer, pianist, storyteller, host
Instruments piano, voice
Jill Tracy is a singer, pianist, writer, composer, performance artist and “musical evocateur” based in San Francisco.
Known for her dark, evocative, cinematic style, Jill Tracy states that some of her biggest childhood influences were film score composers such as Bernard Herrmann, and classic suspense tales, including Alfred Hitchcock and Fritz Lang films, Ray Bradbury stories, and Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone. In an interview, she stated, “I learned from watching ‘The Twilight Zone’ that often it was what you didn’t see that really put the fear in you… How a story could evoke such emotion and response essentially revealing so little. I abide by that in my approach to music. It’s the breath, the spaces between the notes and the arrangements that make the work come alive. The Soul lives in the silence.”
She thinks of her music as a portal, a “way-in” and calls this seductive and magical place she inhabits the “elegant side of the netherworld.”
Jill Tracy is listed in San Francisco Magazine’s Top 100 Creative Forces in the Bay Area, has been awarded “Best of the Bay” by the San Francisco Bay Guardian, and has been nominated for two California Music Awards and SF Weekly Music Awards. She was called “a femme fatale for the thinking man” by the San Francisco Chronicle, which is a moniker that is now frequently used to describe her.
Jill Tracy is the first musician in history to receive a grant from the renowned Mütter Museum in Philadelphia (Francis C. Wood Institute), the nation’s foremost collection of medical oddities. As of 2013, she is currently creating a musical work and accompanying book inspired by the Mütter collection, and her experiences after-dark composing inside the museum.
For over a decade, Jill Tracy has been “Belle of the Ball” at the wildly popular Edwardian Ball, an annual lavish costumed event in San Francisco and Los Angeles, drawing thousands of spectators worldwide in homage to artist Edward Gorey.
Discography
Albums
Quintessentially Unreal (1996)
Diabolical Streak (1999)
Into the Land of Phantoms (2002)
The Bittersweet Constrain (2008)
BENEATH: The Bittersweet Constrain (2011)
Silver Smoke, Star of Night (2012)
Compilations
“Meantime” on Market Street, Best of Café du Nord (live) (2000)
“Evil Night Together” on SIBL (Songs Inspired by Literature) Artists for Literacy (2002)
“Evil Night Together” on Projekt’s A Dark Cabaret (2005)
“Torture” on The Sepiachord Companion (2009)
“In Between Shades” on Projekt’s A Dark Cabaret 2 (2011)
“Coventry Carol” on Projekt’s Ornamental (2012)
“Totenmesse (The Colour of the Flame)” on Songs of Decadence: A Soundtrack to the Writings of Stanisław Przybyszewski (2013)
Collaborations[edit]
“Blood Sucker Blues / Tidal Wave Of Blood” by David J. + Shok (2010)
“Bela Lugosi’s Dead (Undead is Forever)” with David J. (2013)
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