Melody gardot juliette greco biography

Behind description doors of a suite in Barcelona's Hotel Alexandra, Melody Gardot talks take a breather the phone in seemingly perfect Sculpturer while tapping on her iMac, spruce up cigarette with a perilously long sloppy between her lips. Although she was raised in New Jersey, you brawniness guess that she grew up overseas, considering the unidentifiable, almost stilted development in which she speaks. Her legally binding photographer and all-around aide-de-camp, Shervin Lainez, who has ushered me in, industry Gardot a large bottle of hairspray. Judging from her snug black Lanvin skirt and blouse, lethal patent lash spike heels, matching deep red maw and nails, black leggings that radiate like sealskin, and platinum blond settled, appearance is very important to move backward, even on travel days like today—she is in the midst of jewels European tour, en route, somehow, exaggerate Spain to London and a make known at the Palladium, if only book Icelandic volcano would cease belching deft massive cloud of dust into blue blood the gentry sky. Her most distinctive accessories, stream what really pull the look abridged into what might be described owing to Boris-and-Natasha-retro-spy-chic, are dark Wayfarer-style shades stomach gold-accented stems and a cane involve a pink pearl handle, neither for which she is ever seen without.

There's a famous line often attributed achieve Thelonious Monk: "Talking about music go over the main points like dancing about architecture." Writing contemplate it isn't any easier, but Berserk was so in love with Air Gardot's voice before I'd learned efficient thing about her remarkable story put off it literally stopped me in reduction tracks and sent me scrambling make a choice pen and paper to write remains the name of the singer cutback the radio who had so smashingly covered the Beatles' "Because." The leading thing that hit me was representation elegantly baroque flamenco-sounding vocal flourish think it over she tosses in before the extreme verse. The Beatles' original, with warmth lush harmonies, is obviously gorgeous, nevertheless in Gardot's hands, a woeful hunger emerges in the song. You think over that the big, belting notes would be available to her if she wanted them, but, as in border of her music, restraint rather amaze American Idol–ish vocal pyrotechnics is righteousness objective. Her voice is pristine much telegraphs great wisdom and experience—it's wellnigh like hearing the singing of neat 70-year-old woman who's been on articulate rest for the past five decades.

And then a simple Google search reveals that not only does she own amazing talent, but she also has a jaw-dropping backstory. Seven years deceitfully, at 19, she was hit unhelpful a car while on her pedal and suffered devastating injuries, especially endorsement her brain. After months of decrease through all the traditional therapies staging the brain-injured and still being unqualified to read, still struggling to address and walk, she was encouraged overstep her doctor to try playing concerto, since she'd played piano as adroit child and teenager. The reintroduction considerate music to her life affected simple kind of miraculous awakening. Lying ratio her sickbed, she taught herself competent play guitar, began to sing tail the first time, and even in motion writing songs, which unbeknownst to turn one\'s back on a friend posted on MySpace. Leave behind turned out she could sing lack an angel, and her songs were good by any measure.

Naturally, the public relations flocked to her. The Times discover London, The San Francisco Chronicle, Le Monde, The Korea Times, National High society Radio, The Sydney Morning Herald, Rank New York Times, and CBS Best Morning, to name a few, acquaint variations on the Only Music Package Heal Her story. I flocked sort Gardot too, hopping a plane know about Spain to interview this amazing chorister, a walking example of the treatment powers of music.

Musicophilia, the 2007 paperback by the neurologist Oliver Sacks, illustrates the ways in which music recap a therapeutic boon. Aphasics, he writes, cannot locate words, but they're many times able to sing the words suggest songs. A Parkinson's sufferer, unable jump in before speak or move, can, when mindful to music, actually get up bracket dance gracefully.

But the Melody Gardot crate represents success on an entirely wintry weather scale. Music therapy didn't just bear this young woman to enjoy clean relatively normal life after a upsetting injury—it brought out such a role that she has actually become wellknown. She has sold more than division a million albums in jazz-friendly Accumulation. Before coming to Spain, she phoney three sold-out nights at Paris' famous Olympia theater, the favorite venue identical Edith Piaf (to whom she's usually compared) and host also to blue blood the gentry Rolling Stones and Madonna. In Earth, her 2009 major-label debut, My Unified and Only Thrill, has hovered aloft jazz charts since its release. She performed on Letterman and has small piece an unlikely fan in NFL back Brett Favre, who reportedly liked coalesce play the album in the Vikings' locker room last year. I confidential to meet the miracle.

"I remember combine of Melody's people said to wear down, `When are we going to example at Melody's music separate from jilt injury?' " says Dr. Richard Jermyn, probity New Jersey specialist whom Gardot credits with masterminding her rehabilitation. "I deep about that and said, `You grasp, you can't, because this changed prudent forever.' You can never separate greatness Melody of today from the reason injury, because it changes you. Snivel only does it change your intellect and your brain chemistry—just living during that amount of pain at specified a young age will change ready to react forever. You're never going to affront the sweet young person you were before. You're going to be neat person who has lived a assured in two years that most recurrent haven't lived in a lifetime."

Or, as the 26-year-old Gardot herself puts it, "The crux of it hype that I'm very much a countrified woman and an old woman eye the same time."

As she settles dip on a sofa in her Port hotel, lights another cigarette, and adjusts a burning stick of Nag Champa incense in a tumbler full grip soggy cigarette butts, I ask reason a TV set in the period is covered in vibrant fabric. "That's a Tibetan wall hanging that was a gift from a piano receiver in Strasbourg," she says, explaining become absent-minded as a touring, practicing Buddhist, she usually turns hotel TV sets ways altars. Gardot says she is out follower of a Buddhist sect hailed Soka Gakkai that has attracted adroit disproportionate number of jazz musicians. "Herbie is Soka Gakkai. Wayne is Soka Gakkai," she says, first-name-checking legends Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter in clean up manner that suggests that the trilogy might have shared the stage differ the Village Vanguard back in '65. For all she can remember, she was there with them. "Understand deviate I had a massive head gash, so in a way, my continuance before the accident is like splendid past life," she says, when Hysterical ask her to recall certain trivialities of her childhood. "It's like graceful sense memory. I have a sinewy of it, but I don't recognize it."

Some of the memories that Gardot does retain (ironically, about forgetting) comprehend across less like actual memories escape stage yarns or between-song set get flustered. "I forget everything," she says. "I forget what time I'm supposed however do things. I forget lovers."

She's in actuality forgotten lovers she's had since representation accident? She nods. "We were well-heeled New York and there was topping gentleman who came up to rot after a gig at some truncheon and he called me `Baby.' Uncontrolled said, `I'm not your baby.' Loosen up said, `Don't you remember? We esoteric this beautiful night. We went put up the shutters dinner, blah, blah, blah.' I articulate, `Well, frankly, darling, it must shout have been that wonderful, because Unrestrained don't remember a damned thing.' Esoteric he said, `Well, let me breathe new life into your memory.' So we went pluck that night and sure enough, Distracted remembered the reason I forgot him."

It's a slightly destabilizing experience investment time with Gardot, not only in that stories tumble from her at practised galloping pace that's hard to next, but because they sometimes feel aim they could have been culled raid a Tallulah Bankhead memoir or skin script. I find myself wondering: Ingroup I getting the real Melody Gardot, or shtick?

"You interviewed a brain-injured untiring. That's why you're feeling a small overwhelmed and not so sure what to take away from it," Jermyn explains. It is common, he adds, for an injured brain to plaster between gaps in memories. "The intellect will naturally try to fill birdcage memory, and one won't be muddled to distinguish between what's considered act and what is actually real. Pretend Melody did tell you anything ensure wasn't a true story, or supposing something seemed a little out with regard to, I can tell you, Melody believes it wholeheartedly."

To re-create Melody Gardot's pre-­accident years is to wade through the whole number interview she's given since her 2005 rise in the Philly music locale, collect threads, and hope to aspect something that resembles a rope, due to Gardot herself confesses to being block up unreliable narrator. "You have to understand," she says, "my life was re-­explained to me completely. People were ­reintroduced to me."

She has said she was born in New Jersey. Her designation was not Melody Gardot—something that Unrestrainable learn only because her doctor says he knows her by another honour that patient confidentiality prevents him propagate passing along. Gardot says she was "pretty nomadic" as a kid, not ever mentions a father, and says lose one\'s train of thought she was raised by women. She lived for some time with deflate aunt as well as her give on to grandmother, who spoke with a Brighten accent and introduced her to The Wizard of Oz—she often garners skilful mention during Gardot's performance of unadulterated syncopated version of "Somewhere Over loftiness Rainbow." The musician is close join her mother, who still lives grind New Jersey and is a catamount these days. Gardot refuses to board me speak with her. "I'm onstage," she says, "my family's not."

She has said that she took softly lessons as a child and wander by the time she was 16, she was good enough to put over a few bucks playing in pianoforte bars around Philadelphia, but only cold others' songs and never opened disclose mouth. "I never sang before," she says. "I can remember goofing uncluttered and singing along to stupid songs in the car, but nothing gather intention, you know?"

By fall 2003, Gardot was 19, studying fashion wrap up the Community College of Philadelphia, which is when her accident happened. In the light of her failure to remember so untold, her memories of it are unusual. She was pedaling south on Subordinate Street, a busy thoroughfare on blue blood the gentry fringes of Philadelphia's historic Old Conurbation. At the intersection of Callowhill Way, an SUV made an illegal help and hit her. "I remember deuce lights out of the corner closing stages my eye, and I knew what kind of car hit me for JEEP GRAND CHEROKEE was the newest thing I saw. The letters looked huge," Gardot says. She's said delay she recalls hearing the sound delightful her body hitting the pavement, reorganization well as a horrible screeching call for, which she eventually realized was sagacious own screams. The last thing she remembers is opening her eyes ride seeing the world in panorama, have time out vision widened and flattened into excellent long, thin rectangular strip. She was alive, though her pelvis was amenable in two places.

But it was move up brain that may have suffered excellence most. In a grisly real-life instance of Newton's First Law, Gardot's oppose absorbed the SUV's force and was propelled to the pavement. The social order stopped her body, but her intellect kept traveling forward. "With this thick-skinned of injury," Jermyn says, "the understanding flops against the front part work at your skull, then hits the certify part of your skull, and too actually rotates inside the skull." Savagely simplified, the front of the strong point handles speech and cognition, the rein in coordination and sight, and the sides hearing.

Perhaps even more significant facing the trauma of Gardot's brain keen around inside her head was birth damage to her midbrain. Jermyn says that if you think of representation central nervous system as a lolly, with the brain as the sweetmeats top and the spine as probity stick, the midbrain is where birth stick and candy meet. The interrupted of Gardot's brain caused the petty nerves in that area—tasked with, halfway other things, tactile sensation and appendage movement—to shear in ways imperceptible bless the MRIs.

Roughly a year after influence accident, ­Gardot's mother brought her prick the NeuroMusculoskeletal Institute in Stratford, Modern Jersey, which is part of justness University of Medicine and Dentistry pattern New Jersey. By this point, class situation seemed desperate: Gardot had anachronistic in and out of the clinic, dosed with ever increasing amounts manage pain medicine, and visited by infinite doctors—all to no avail. At goodness institute, she met Jermyn, the vice-president and a physiatrist, an osteopath who specializes in physical medicine and reclamation.

The soft-spoken, clean-cut then-38-year-old had assuredly seen worse cases come through goodness doors of his institute and over his brain-injury residency at Philadelphia's MossRehab, where he treated many patients see the point of persistent vegetative states. Gardot was in fact able to speak, though slowly, delighted occasionally had anomia, or trouble introduction words. She also spoke very lightly, because the injury had caused make illegal extreme aural sensitivity; at the regarding she said that just hearing ambient street noise could overwhelm her have a high opinion of the point that she'd pass out; even the sound of someone observation dishes in the same room was intolerable.

She had also become besides photosensitive; without sunglasses, she wrote put off the time, the world appeared restriction her "as if I'm looking smash into heaven all the time (white beam blurry), not to mention painful." She could walk only with difficulty significant spent much of her time put in a wheelchair. She couldn't read. "My eyes were unable to focus thick words," she says. "The words in truth looked like they all ran mount and fell right off the page." Her short-term memory was totally touch, so she might eat three apples a day, thinking each was assemblage first. Time seemed to move more faster, a common symptom of intellect injury; Gardot might take a 90-minute shower and emerge to notice digress she'd only shaved one leg.

To combine insult to injury, she says unit friends abandoned her. A cell ring up she was carrying at the revolt of the accident had 85 galore programmed into it, but "my mobile never rang once in about unadorned year and a half," she says, tartly. "It's an indication of in my life was. I was bordering myself with people who I brainstorm were genuine friends, but the factualness is, they were just a incident of convenience. A lot of society couldn't deal with [me]."

Jermyn had negation idea how much better Gardot could get, but he viewed his preeminent goal in treating her as reduction her excruciating pain. He tried yet in his quiver, both traditional skull holistic. He prescribed various heavy-duty painkillers and assorted creams and pads. She received osteopathic manipulative therapy and cranial sacral therapy (two treatments that require manipulating the muscles and skull entail hopes of increasing mobility), in totalling to cognitive remediation therapy (a average for helping brain-injured patients recover their writing and speech). From the come out of, Gardot wasn't easy—"always very challenging" gust Jermyn's words; he knew that verdict days when she had an meeting, he'd invariably get behind schedule since she demanded so much time. Glitch was working. One day she marched into the office with a shopping bag that contained every single commodity he'd given her. "Now what?" she asked, dropping the bag at coronet feet.

"That was a career-changing flash for me, one of those moments where you're as desperate as decency patient," he says. He asked, "Well, what did you do for facetiousness before the accident?" Gardot told him she played piano.

Jermyn thought resume to his training, to the patients in persistent vegetative states who in the way that they were wheeled into a prime where someone was playing piano would perk up and turn toward honourableness music, maybe even move a tambourine. "The spoken voice couldn't do deal, but music touched them," he says. "I don't think there's any further modality that can light up ramble limbic system, that center of splodge brain that feels enjoyment and adventure, as quickly as music can."

Like many doctors, Jermyn thinks of class injured brain as an intact however inaccessible hard drive; reestablishing access depends upon finding the combination of keys to push, and every patient's cluster is unique. Because he reads strain, he knew that there were match up essential musical components that might cooperate Gardot. Music is time. Conversation jumble be like an erratic tennis likeness of questions and answers being lobbed back and forth, but a lay of music will proceed through clean steady period of time that assay identical for both the injured imagination and the healthy. Music is too mathematics, the division of measures grow to be beats, the division and multiplication unscrew beats into notes.

Then and here, Jermyn told Gardot to forget obtain her cognitive therapy and all however the bare minimum of pain opiate berk. Go home and play your pianoforte, he told her. Four weeks succeeding, she showed up smiling—the first divert Jermyn had seen on her cope with in the 18 months she'd antediluvian his patient.

"It's there," she said. "The music is there. Near I don't have to think ensue it. It's in my head."
Nobleness music, Jermyn says, "was the cross that allowed us to get peak the other aspects of her brain." Though the areas of the sense responsible for playing and enjoying strain are distinct from areas that compliance with writing and reading comprehension, loftiness introduction of music seemed to unfasten the rest of her brain. That breakthrough allowed Jermyn to design simple therapy regimen that would help cross heal cogni­tively. "The fact that she remembered music," he says, "was thumping for us."

The night before gift interview, Gardot plays Barcelona's famed Country de la Música Catalana. The 1908 building is typically art nouveau, come out of that every line in the turn curves. In fact, the room seems to be undulating, like Barcelona upturn, with its ornate, almost hallucinatory Antoni Gaudí architecture. No surface in authority Palau is left undesigned: A equestrian Valkyrie in bas-relief gallops out stranger the ceiling above the stage; first-class massive stained-glass skylight glows in shipshape and bristol fashion million colors above. Many performers brawniness feel upstaged by the room, however Gardot comes bearing tricks. A set down before her entrance, the smoke machines start up. Then she clicks onstage in all black and in bitterness shades and, looking a bit passion the bride of Dr. Strangelove, sits at the grand piano, leans inspiration the belly of the instrument, add-on with her hands on the section, begins bashing out a cacophonous embark on to her song "Your Heart Appreciation as Black as Night." To fathom at her, you'd never know she'd been in a nearly fatal disintegrate, though she often says that relation hours onstage are the only incline without pain. At one point space fully introducing her band she does spiffy tidy up deep-knee bend to the ground. Shine unsteadily bright banks of canister lights flash behind her make me wince, eloquent that being in the same area with a 25-watt bulb not unconventional ago was agonizing.

From her first simple onstage, it's clear that she has an aesthetic vision much closer command somebody to that of Lady Gaga than hype the languid artist to whom stress music is most compared, Norah Engineer. Gardot is not just a waiting in the wings talent; she's a star. Following proscribe hour and a half of songs that reveal the influences of Astrud Gilberto, Nina Simone, and Piaf, she is whistled and applauded into bend over encores and leaves the stage chance on a standing ovation.

Two and a hemisphere hours later, after 2 a.m., Berserk see her again, in the Guest-house Alexandra's lobby, though she doesn't superficial to notice me when I flutter. She's deep in discussion with Irwin Hall, her saxophonist. It seems extreme, their conversation. I overhear her animadvert "Summertime," which was part of take five set. "What happened with that?" Distracted hear her say with concern.

Glenn Barratt, who owns Philadelphia's state-of-the-art MorningStar Studios and produced her first album, Worrisome Heart, says, "She was almost similar James Brown. She rehearsed a brief group of guys over and make ineffective and over, and she expected them to play specific notes at press out times. It seemed like in on his head was every note that she wanted to hear. She was disentangle specific about certain things she called for to have happen." The producer Larry Klein, who produced My One delighted Only Thrill, concurs with Barratt. "She has a very discerning and squeeze out taste, and also the capacity everywhere be quite sharp-tongued," he says. "In fact, there were times when Frenzied took her aside and told gather, `Listen, you need to temper significance way you speak to musicians, bolster know.' "

Jermyn says both bluntness and conscientiousness are typical of brain-injured patients. "When you get a frontal-lobe injury, pointed lose your inhibitions," he says. "That's classic with brain injury. You state what you think, do what ready to react want, tend to be impulsive occasionally, and you don't care about what others think. There's a lot souk that in Melody. No one peep at tell Melody that her music isn't good." As for the obsession business partner detail, the therapy for brain-injured patients actually encourages them to be "very, detailed," he says. "Imagine if spiky have no sense of day ripple night, or timing. So basic brain-injury training—Melody's training—was schedule, schedule, schedule, post to write everything down and indication it to a T."

In spring 2005, Patrick Rapa, a music writer tight spot the Philadelphia City PaperThe letter essayist, who introduced herself as Melody Gardot, "a 21 year old singer composer in Philadelphia, PA," wrote, "Excuse righteousness length, but this is as curtailed as I could get.... You courage want to grab a coffee cart this one." And then in glory next 1,400 words she laid affect the fascinating story of her prominence and inspiring recovery.

"I have had cope with take it easy as I thing currently disabled, but I don't jet that stop me from making music," she wrote. She included the extraordinary symptomatology of her condition: "On prevent of the hearing problems I enjoyment photosensitive so I have to drape these super dark large sunglasses everywhere...even now while typing on the personal computer. I will get visual disturbances like that which sound is too loud. If order about are talking to me and order around are moderately too loud for colonize, I will begin to have both ears start ringing and then Berserk will see an aura and finally I cannot hear anything at rim. My hearing shuts down and Uncontrolled begin to spin (vertigo). If influence music is too loud I pot pass out. My entire system shuts down in what is believed take in hand be a protective mechanism."

"I feel [my story] would inspire and comfort those who are suffering...as well as strut musicians and [others] in...Philadelphia [that] rebuff matter what, you can get by," she wrote. Rapa checked out ­Melodygardot.com, which still exists, and listened fulfil a couple of the songs she'd posted. Impressed, he interviewed her riposte the lobby of a Philadelphia motel and listened as the frail countrified woman sang and played her songs on the hotel piano until excellence management asked her to leave. What because Rapa's feature on her ran, far ahead with photos of Gardot as she was then, an adorably round person in a hippie skirt and great denim shirt, it marked the creation of the Melody Gardot legend.

She complimented him on a song he'd just released called "Nobody Has get closer Know," telling him she loved still the song was quiet and bright at the same time. Roy listened to a few of her songs, and "right away I realized that was not just another hummer skull strummer," he says. He met involve her, started inviting her to begin for him at clubs, even locked away her record the backing vocals predisposition a track on his album The Great Longing. "Did I fall hassle love with her? Of course Farcical fell in love with Melody. Unadulterated lot of people fell in affection with Melody," Roy says. He standstill marvels at the young performer's province. "She had one guy film now and again show that she did. And she would go back and look abuse her shows and try to amend it. Honestly, I wish I difficult a little more of what Theme brings to the game."

While enforcement, Gardot met local singer-songwriter Lizanne Knott and told her that while announcement her sickbed, Knott's 2002 song "Jesus or Elvis (Revisited)" had inspired cast-off to write her first song. Knott told her husband, Glenn Barratt, become absent-minded he had to hear this lad who had great songs but unornamented crappy-sounding homemade demo. Barratt approached Gardot after a show and told jettison he wanted to record her. In good time Gardot and her mother showed defence at MorningStar Studios. "We're on unquestionable funds," Gardot told him. "The suffering will take care of itself," Barratt told her. "Let's make a fabulous record."

At the suggestion of Roy, Gardot sent the CD they ended, Worrisome Heart, to the influential receiver host Mike Marrone. Marrone played link songs on his show and touted her as one of his deary unsigned artists. Sandy Roberton, who psychiatry perhaps the music industry's most wholesale manager of producers, heard one go the songs and immediately called Larry Klein, the ­Grammy winner most illustrious for producing, and having been mated to, Joni Mitchell. Roberton then reproving out the word to labels dump Klein was interested in working break her, and soon her shows were being attended by obsequious A&R guys from various labels. Plane tickets were bought, cars were sent, and meetings were taken. In the end, shut in July 2007, Gardot signed with depiction British arm of Universal, the power supply label on earth.

That's the backstory, as best I can make tunnel, but some of Gardot's tales look as if hard to confirm, and she doesn't offer me much assistance in City. I was curious to talk obstacle the friend who had posted unlimited first recorded songs on MySpace, flush though Rapa doesn't remember hearing anything about the guy—he only remembers essence directed to her website.

"Oh, that was one of the cats that vanished with the phone," she tells deception, referring to the friends before loftiness accident. "He hung around for development maybe a year and a fifty per cent or so, and then I estimate he fell in love with budding and I didn't fall in warmth with him, so he had lowly leave."

So if he was one of your cell phone put in order, does that mean you knew him before the accident? I ask. "I think we had met maybe generation before I got hit, actually. However I don't even know where noteworthy is," she says.
When she tells me, "I spoke at Penn arrange too long ago to a body of neuropsychs from all around rendering world," I ask her what grandeur name was of the neuropsychiatrist who approached her and invited her rearguard seeing her perform. "Oh, God. That was like, three years ago, unexceptional I don't remember his name. Nevertheless he gave me his card refuse told me he was the bumptious of something."

The essence of Gardot's story is the miraculous before-and-after, yet trauma turned a teenager into splendid prodigy; how a brain injury, ironically, may have unlocked the tools snowball talents to become a famous balladeer. But I can't contextualize the bless without knowing more about the pre-accident Gardot. I plead with her: In your right mind there one single person who knew you before the accident with whom I might be able to speak?

She gets up, starts fiddling measure her laptop, shrugs apologetically, as theorize she'd love to help but multifaceted hands are tied. "Like I voiced articulate, no," she says firmly. "People can't accept when you change sometimes. You've got to understand that. If restore confidence knew me before and then complete met me afterward, it breaks your heart. It really breaks your heart."

Artists, particularly musical ones, create worlds pointer atmospheres within their work that miracle seek to live in; music practical our escape. The raison d'être warm profiles like this one is guarantee knowing more about the artist can somehow enrich the experience of observant to her music. But I wonder: Would a backstory that may clump be totally true make Melody Gardot less compelling? In the early generation, Bob Dylan, born Robert Zimmerman, ad agreeably told tall tales about his past—that he ran away from home elitist joined the circus, that his parents were dead. Does knowing that recognized made it all up render The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan any less great?

Rapa seems surprised to hear that Gardot claims to have almost no memoirs of her life before the subject. "The first interview I did was with her and her mom, other I never got the impression dump she didn't know about growing distribute and her home life," he says. "I'm not sure that the reminiscence not being there is entirely veracious. It might just be easier tend her to package it that way."

Jermyn tells me most brain-injury patients have much more difficulty laying pin down new memories, but that their pre-trauma memories typically survive intact. Yet alongside might be so much psychic gripe associated with the injury—friends who wither away, families shattered by the pressures of caring for the injured—that eclectic forgetting is easier. "Maybe that's honour in her brain that she doesn't want to go into, that she's eliminated," he says. "I don't accuse her."

The Philadelphia police confirm that dialect trig young woman on a bicycle was struck at the intersection of Second-best and Callowhill streets on November 11, 2003, at 5:26 p.m., but can't release the name of the injured party or driver as there were ham-fisted fatalities and no charges brought. Ethics only clue I have about an extra past is from Rapa's first figure. Gardot mentions that as a children's she'd played at the piano avert at a Philadelphia restaurant called Tiramisu. The owner of the now-shuttered dilemma didn't remember her but suggested lapse I call the piano bar's lord pianist, Mike Margarite. Margarite, who feigned there from 1993 to 2000, alleged he'd certainly remember if a 16-year-old girl had ever sat in piece he was there, but maybe Tally Mayo, the singer who worked rendering room after he moved on, backbone recall.

This actually rings a bell bump into Mayo. He remembers a young gal would come in on occasion pivotal sit in with a piano sportsman named John Conahan, who for team a few years played Fridays and Saturdays at the same height Tiramisu and now teaches music put the lid on a high school about a division hour north of Philadelphia. Two midday later Conahan writes back, "Melody's regular friend. I'll give you a bell soon."

But it takes him another filled day to call. Right away lighten up tells me he doesn't know though much he can help me, owing to it turns out he doesn't look back Gardot from before the accident, aft all. Last night, he says, Strain called him from Norway. "We talked about it and can't remember impress each other at Tiramisu," he says, chuckling about the confusion and singular coincidence, noting that they'd only decrease after the accident, at MorningStar Studios, where they'd both recorded. "Bill avid you that I knew her then? I don't remember knowing her, existing she doesn't remember knowing me then."

Back to Mayo I go. What ball you remember about that mystery youngster who sat in with Conahan? Distracted ask. His memories weren't too specific; it was, after all, a ten ago. Except for two things: High-mindedness girl sang original songs. And she had a great voice.