Life’s certainties include death and taxes, a saying made famous by Benjamin Franklin. And I thought the third thing was that shows featuring old-school vocal jazz, backed up only with a swinging hollow-body guitar, would always be intimate affairs, attended by a small, elite audience of elders, not unlike myself.
But when the duo of Rachael & Vilray played a show at East Nashville’s Riverside Revival last November, the 400-capacity room was packed with and energized by folks of all ages. Also to their credit, the audience was silent and focused as the duo on stage played original songs, set to the harmonic language and the classic lyrical craft of Tin Pan Alley and Broadway of the 1930s and 40s.
Here’s the catch. Rachael Price is the remarkable lead singer for the eclectic and magical band Lake Street Dive, a roots/pop music phenomenon that’s grown over 15 years to major music halls and, in 2024, to headlining Madison Square Garden. So she’s a known quantity, widely revered for her supple, animated, pitch-perfect voice.
Not as well known is that for years Price exclusively sang traditional jazz, from girlhood through music college. A few years after she’d switched gears to sing with the more adventurous, modern Lake Street Dive, her jazz love and life was rekindled by a fortuitous revival of a friendship with guitar player Vilray Bolles, who goes by his first name only. Rachael & Vilray are a surprising, charming, deeply musical duo with extensive touring and recording to their credit, and when the chance came to sit down with an indie/Americana vocal star, plus a wickedly smart songwriter and guitarist, hours before the Nashville show, I jumped at it.
Rachael and Vilray (pronounced VIL-ree) were briefly students together at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, where she met the members of Lake Street Dive. She did the full run and graduated. Vilree took some classes and then put himself through a rigorous, chronological study of jazz. But he didn’t find his niche as an artist, and for a decade he hung up music and took a job as an accountant. Then came a film-worthy story he tells about an accident with his hand that made him afraid of never playing again. Thus inspired, he turned back to it, taking a challenging but effective strategy of practicing in public, busking in the New York subway.
“Everyone that was close to Vilray understood deeply that he was a truly profound musician, and we all had this feeling like, Oh, if he does music again, something great will come out of it,” Rachael says in Episode #347. “And so when I saw him play these obscure songs from the 40s and sing so beautifully and play so beautifully…it really was like a time travel moment. It was Vilary who made me want to sing jazz again.”
But as Vilray remembers, making it click took quite a few years of life in New York, where they’d both moved after music school, as he worked his way back to performing and she toured the world with her band. “And in that context, Rachel and I became closer friends. And she proposed at some point in that 10 years that we should play some music,” he relates. “She was like, you like this old jazz stuff. I love this old jazz stuff. Let's play. And I was like, I'm really rusty. I don't think it's gonna work. So we did play. It didn't work! And she very politely never brought it up again. And then I ended up playing a gig in a bar, and Rachael came and saw that gig, and that's how we got into it.”
They’ve released three albums now, starting with a self-titled effort on Nonesuch Records in 2019, prompting Popmatters to say: “the duo exposes emotional authenticity in a candid and intimate manner.” That and other articles sometimes refer to their songs as “standards” when in fact, they’re overwhelmingly written by Vilray in the here and now. On their most recent album West Of Broadway (Concord Jazz), Vilray’s sharp eye turns to on-again-off-again love affairs (in “Forever Never Lasts”), exclusive havens in the Big Apple (“My Key To Gramercy Park”), life’s absurdities (“Is It Jim?”) and clueless dilettantes (“Off Broadway”, which they sing with guest Stephen Colbert, who is a fan.) My favorite is the steamy romance of “Closer,” written with verbal intricacy, sung with subdued passion, and supported by a gorgeous band, produced by Nashville’s versatile Dan Knobler.
Their fall tour was just the two of them, and little is lost without a full band, given how their voices twine together and how deliberate Vilray’s guitar is at motivating the harmony and rhythm. Price thinks of the music as minimal in a good way. “I've had people come up to me after our shows saying they'd never seen anything like that,” she says. “You know, maybe they've only gone to shows that are full bands or really loud. And I think it's really important and special to hear sparse music played.”
Asked about the audience, Vilray says: “I want them to leave having felt everything, you know? Joy and heartache and love. We tell a lot of jokes, and it's like a cabaret or something. It's a kind of show that I don't think really exists anymore. And, yeah, it's a lot of fun.”
