Datri Bean

Steeped in hot muggy weather, love, God and corn whiskey, Datri Bean's music is a combination of old-time piano, sepia toned vocals, and just-sitting-on-the-porch songwriting. Her original tunes weave story laced Americana with 1930's style jazz melodies. Bean was raised in a rodeo family on the plains of Wyoming. Listening to her mother's scratchy Scott Joplin records, at the age of five, she began to study piano seriously.

Bean was raised in a rodeo family on the plains of Wyoming. Listening to her mother's scratchy Scott Joplin records, at the age of five, she began to study piano seriously. She kicked around here and there, eventually landing in a big house in Austin, full of jazz musicians, hooligans, exchange students and bike mechanics, from whom she learned to play jazz, fix bicycles, speak Russian and drink hooch- all at the same time.

Pulled by the love of a very special bicycle mechanic, Datri was dragged kicking and screaming from Austin to Seattle Datri coped by crying as perpetually as the Seattle skies and singing songs about the sunny South. She soon returned to Austin to record her ten-song, all original, debut album, Slow Down Summertime, working with Stanley Smith (Asylum Street Spankers) on clarinet, Rob Jewett (Wayne the Train Hancock) on upright bass, and Scott French on drums. On some particularly sassy tracks, she is joined by Terry Shimazu on an almost gospel Hammond B3 organ, and, on the tearjerker Not Enough Winter, by pedal steel legend, Kim Deschamps.