PEACH is an American Blues artist - singer and guitarist - born and raised in Anderson, Indiana. She grew up listening to the cool sounds of Ella Fitzgerald, Aretha Franklin, and Billie Holiday. At age 11, she started singing in her church choir and got her first electric guitar.
PEACH began playing professionally at 16. She went off to University of Denver to study music. There her accompanist was Condoleeza Rice, the former national security adviser and secretary of state in the George W. Bush administration.
She ended up in San Francisco, where she bummed around playing with funk and jazz musicians like Smith Dobson, Russell Ferrante, Davis Ramney, and Jim Nichols. For a while, she toured Japan as a solo jazz musician, then returned to the States and played with Jim Messina for a time.
PEACH has recorded with Taj Mahal (a duet - "Real Thing"), Keb' Mo' ("It Meant Nothing"), Garth Hudson (The Band) and Paul Berrere (Little Feat), among many others.
PEACH is proud to use hand crafted guitars by Asher Guitars / Bill Asher, including a T Deluxe, Rambler, and an Electric Hollow T, and pedals by Klon Centaur.
These days, when PEACH isn't out on tour with her band, she calls Venice, California, home.
Here's an article that tells you some more about PEACH:
Peach
The Real Thing
Blues Rock Records
“The Real Thing is Peach meets The Band.”
-- Amos Garrett
It’s a rare joy to discover an artist whose music
adds to, or at least enhances, the meaning of life. A rare joy, a relief,
and also an underlying apprehension; what if you had never happened upon
it? What if you had been just plain lazy about listening to it? And then
finally you did and fell in love with it and then wondered how you ever
managed a day without it. That’s when you know it’s The Real
Thing.
Peach isn’t exactly a new artist and this isn’t
exactly her Blues Rock Records debut. But when you have the singular pleasure
of discovering this ever-fresh, Los Angeles-based singer-songwriter-guitarist,
whether it’s with her current masterpiece (no exaggeration) The
Real Thing, her acclaimed live underground release Peach Live! (2002),
which won her a coveted distribution deal with Morada Music, or her first
recording, the EP The Cure for You (2001), then it doesn’t matter
that you’re coming to the party a little late. As long as you’re
here...
The prestigious L.A. Music Awards have been dialed in to
Peach from the not-so-long-ago beginning, naming her Blues Artist of the
Year in 2001. Noting the Anderson, Indiana native’s consistent quality
as a musician and performer, this music industry arbiter of talent followed
it up with an Award of Excellence in 2002. But the L.A. Music Awards wasn’t
the only one to give credit where it’s due.
With no artificial anything, The Real Thing is a historical
record, sounding the return of the lost art of music with an unmitigated
who’s-who of blues and jazz players showing up to back Peach on
this truly spectacular collection of songs produced by Marty Grebb (The
Band, Bonnie Raitt, Etta James).
She duets with Taj Mahal on the title track, and serenades “Beyond
My Wildest Dream,” backed by Reggie McBride (Tony Bennett, Keb’
Mo’) on upright bass, whom she admiringly calls “the Mack
truck of bass.” There’s The Band’s Garth Hudson (keys,
sax, accordion); James Gadson (The Temptations, Beck) and Gary Mallaber
(Van Morrison, Bruce Springsteen) on drums; Peach’s own drummer/percussionist
Maria Martinez (Barry White); baritone sax player Cece Worrall Rubin (Diana
Ross, Guns n’ Roses); Paul Barrére (Little Feat), Jon Woodhead
(Leon Russell), and Rick Vito (Fleetwood Mac) all on slide; guitarist
Amos Garrett (Stevie Wonder, Maria Muldaur), “the world’s
most bendy-note guy,” according to Peach; and horn arrangement by
Lee Thornburg (The Tonight Show Band, Tower of Power) on “Someone
Else is Steppin’ In.”
The list is long on power players, but to Peach, what really mattered
was who was right for each of the lucky 13 tracks, half which she wrote,
including the gorgeous ballad, “The Cure for You,” featuring
a sax solo by smooth jazz superstar Mindi Abair. The balance were written
by the likes of Bobby Charles, who says he adores her rendering of his
1972 classic “I Must Be in a Good Place Now”; Danny Timms
and Jodi Siegel, who penned the Triple A radio emphasis track, the sultry
“Come Up and See Me Sometime”; and Jerry Lynn Williams (Eric
Clapton) and Grebb, who conceived “Beyond My Wildest Dream.”
“They’re songs that I dug up by local
songwriters that I thought were incredibly great pieces of music,”
explains the former University of Denver voice major, whose accompanist
was Condoleezza Rice, who left the piano for politics as National Security
Adviser. “It’s all pretty sexy music, but it’s also
really real.”
A tireless philanthropist, Peach is the co-founder of Rock
‘n Cure, an annual event she produces and performs in to benefit
Cedars-Sinai Medical Center’s breast cancer and stem cell transplant
research. The organization’s 2003 flagship concert format fundraiser,
which Peach headlined with special guests The Delgado Brothers at the
House of Blues in Los Angeles raised $78,000 – not bad for a first
run production.
Just as Rice didn’t know at that time that she was
destined for The White House (“She was on her way to being a great
starving musician,” Peach laughs), Peach didn’t know she was
a blues player.
But the real thing always shines through. She found
her voice, and here’s to everyone else discovering it too.
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