Saviano Media Changes Name and Direction
New firm, Ellis Creative, merges public relations services with project management, marketing, event production, book publishing and other creative ventures
Public Relations firm Saviano Media has changed its name to Ellis Creative and will merge the company’s publicity services with project management, marketing, event production, book publishing and other creative ventures.
Ellis Creative is named in honor of owner Tamara Saviano’s maternal grandfather, the late Ellis Leavitt. “My grandfather was my first mentor and teacher. He inspired and encouraged me to live my life and build a career on my own terms. Naming the company after him will be a daily reminder of his wisdom.”
Ellis Creative has two missions: 1) To assist artists in their continual development in an ever changing and evolving world; 2) To create new artistic assets for the greater good of society.
The company kicks off its new services with three new music project management assignments and the co-publishing of two children’s books.
Ellis Creative will act as project managers for Gretchen Peter’s beautiful new CD Burnt Toast & Offerings, Beth Nielsen Chapman’s anticipated Prism CD of world hymns, and Thirty Tigers’ release of Song of America, the compilation CD inspired by former Attorney General Janet Reno. The company will also co-publish Fly Baby and Monster Sandwich. The children’s books are authored by Saviano’s longtime friend, Dr. Michael Reilly, founder of the Holistic and Family Practice Medicine clinic based in the Chicago suburb of Lake Zurich.
Ellis Creative will continue to specialize in public relation and marketing services for the music industry, focusing on artists who are singers, songwriters and musicians and who serve an adult audience, primarily in the genres of Americana, folk, bluegrass, roots rock and alt-country. Current clients include Kris Kristofferson, Beth Nielsen Chapman, Gretchen Peters and Dan Colehour.
The staff at Ellis Creative includes Saviano, publicist Annie Mosher and audio-video engineer Paul Whitfield who will oversee event production. Ellis Creative will continue to partner with noted writer Alanna Nash and documentary filmmaker Lori Savitch for ghostwriting and life story films.
For more information about Ellis Creative contact:
Tamara Saviano / Ellis Creative / tamara@ellis-creative.com
Feel A Hunk O' Burnin' Love with
The Bluegrass Elvises, Volume One
Shawn Camp & Billy Burnette
Available August 16, 2007 to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the death of Elvis Presley
On July 6, 1954, in a 30 x 18 foot recording studio at 706 Union Avenue in Memphis, TN., a 19-year old hopeful with the unlikely name of Elvis Presley grabbed an acoustic guitar and dared to do the unthinkable. With a doghouse bass and a primitive electric guitar egging him on, he put a gnawing scrub rhythm to Bill Monroe's "Blue Moon of Kentucky," changing Monroe's elegant waltz to a 4/4 rockabilly tune, and charging both forms with the slurred vibrato that would become his signature. "Fine, man! Hell, that's different," Sun Studio owner Sam Phillips famously remarked. "That's a pop song now, nearly 'bout!"
What had started as a parody became the B-side of Presley's first single. But in the fall of 1954, when Elvis played Monroe's 1947 classic on his only appearance on the Grand Ole Opry, he approached the Father of Bluegrass backstage in his dressing room and apologized.
"I thought he had a beautiful voice," Monroe recalled in the '80s, speaking in his brittle husk of a tenor. "I told him, "Well, if it give you your start, it's all right with me." But it also made Monroe re-think his own composition, and the elder musician later re-recorded the song, shoving the tempo up into overdrive and showcasing a syncopated mandolin break as a hallmark of the bluegrass idiom.
Rules, it seems, are made to be broken. Which brings us to the Bluegrass Elvises, aka bluegrass/country singer Shawn Camp and rockabilly/country performer Billy Burnette, who spent nearly a decade with Fleetwood Mac and now tours frequently with John Fogerty. Shawn is yin to Billy's yang. And both men are steeped in the snaky soul of the Tennessee-Arkansas mythology of the '50s, born of the spirit of Elvis.
Billy, whose father Dorsey and uncle Johnny Burnette used to kick a young Elvis out of their rehearsals in the laundry room at the Lauderdale Courts housing project, had so many connections to Presley—with Crown Electric and Humes High figuring prominently in their shared stories—that they felt like kin.
"They were all good buddies, they all knew the same people, [guitarist] Scotty Moore and [bass player] Bill Black," Billy says. "Elvis used to call the house a lot." Things were happening so fast in the early '50s--when Billy and his cousin, Rocky, were born three weeks apart, their dads named their new "rockabilly" style after them—that at first it was hard to tell which Memphis practitioner would get famous first. Billy, with a pair of black sideburns in his future, would meet them all, including Elvis on a downtown Memphis street during his "Teddy Bear" era.
Two hundred miles over in Arkansas, Shawn would grow up grooving on his parents' Sun singles, his fascination eventually leading to a peanut butter and banana-fed addiction. In years to come, Presley fervor would take such a firm grip on his psyche that he would get, as Elvis might put it, "real, real gone." He'd make all the pilgrimages—stopping at Graceland every time he went through Memphis, even seeking out the forgotten grave of Elvis's paternal grandfather in Louisville. The cab of his truck became a cocoon, a nesting room spun from the sounds of the Sirius Elvis channel. And when he put his mind to it, he could imitate Elvis's Whitehaven-via-Tupelo drawl so perfectly as to maybe even fool mama Gladys.
Fate has a way of bringing such people together, of course. Labelmates at Warner Bros. in the early '90s, Billy and Shawn eventually joined to play a little music together, and to write more than 100 songs, including Alan's Jackson's "Burnin' the Honky Tonks Down" and Del McCoury's "My Love Will Not Change."
Then, in 2003, as on that seminal day at Sun in 1954, genius raged. Shawn, mindful that country music was at the heart of such early Elvis offerings as "I'm Left, You're Right, She's Gone" and "I Forgot to Remember to Forget," made a furtive notation on a piece of paper...something about doing an album of Elvis songs high-lonesome style. A few weeks later, he and Billy were at the Nashville studio of Cowboy Jack Clement – the famed engineer who watched it all go down at Sun and has the scratches Elvis made on his guitar to prove it – when producer David Ferguson walked in and off-handedly suggested they cut a bluegrass Elvis record. "It all came together right then," Shawn remembers. "And a month later we started cutting on this thing."
First session: January 8, Elvis's birthday, at Ferguson's tiny Naughty Pines studio. With Dave Talbot on banjo and Terry Eldridge thumping bass--Aubrey Haynie would later replace Shawn's own fiddle parts--they kicked into "Good Rockin' Tonight," "Mystery Train," and "A Big Hunk O' Love." Even they were surprised with what they had. When they played back the 'grassy yipping on "Good Rockin' Tonight," a delightfully eerie sound that threatened to reach into the stratosphere, everybody's hair stood on end.
The melding of bluegrass and rockabilly turned out to be such an organic synthesis that it went down smooth and easy, Billy's rocking, back-alley swagger twining with Shawn's joyous, hillbilly tenor in a sweet siren call of seduction: "She said, 'Meet me in a hurry out behind the barn'/Don't you worry baby I'll do you no harm.'" At the end, it's easy to imagine the ghost of Bill Monroe crowing, "That's different! That's a bluegrass song now, nearly 'bout!"
Still, the album languished for several years, until Shawn mentioned it to Tamara Saviano, the Grammy winning founder of American Roots Publishing. Saviano enthusiastically sanctioned the project, and a second session was quickly underway, this time at the Butcher Shoppe with sidemen Scott Vestal (banjo), Chris Henry (mandolin), Aubrey Haynie (fiddle) and Mike Bub (bass). As before, the vibe in the studio was blue suede bliss, beginning with the 28-second intro, "2007: A Bluegrass Oddity," a brilliant, if hilarious take on "Also Sprach Zarathustra," the Richard Strauss tone poem widely known from Stanley Kubrick's 1968 film "2001: A Space Oddyssey," and which Presley used to open his shows in the '70s.
"We're not making fun of either bluegrass or Elvis, but we laughed a lot on this record, hearing some of the classic Elvis licks done in a bluegrass fashion," Billy says, recalling the fiddle flourishes on "Little Sister," the mandolin fills on "Hound Dog," and the banjo zings on "A Big Hunk O' Love." (The latter rendition was inspired as much by Bonnie Raitt's version as Presley's.) Most of the songs have been totally recast, "Don't Be Cruel" standing as one of the few songs that retain the original tempo. For "Blue Suede Shoes," the two pulled nuances from Bill Monroe's "Heavy Traffic Ahead," and added jazz, western-swing, and jump blues stylings.
Other surprises abound: Shawn's masterful and heartfelt recitation on "Are You Lonesome Tonight," where Haynie lays down a mournful twin-fiddle effect; Billy's switchblade sharp vocal on "Jailhouse Rock," perhaps the first understandable reading of the lyrics; and the inclusion of original verses of "Hound Dog" that Elvis chose not to record.
"I did the Elvis version up front, and then at the end I did the Big Mama Thornton lyric, but a little bit from the male perspective," Shawn says of the latter song. "And I used her attack, the way she emphasized specific words."
The project was so inventively fun that everyone stayed behind long after the sessions had ended. "I'll tell you," Shawn recalls, "it's rare that you work on a record and even at the mix stage, listen back and enjoy it so much that you're almost dancing around. And everybody in the studio was doing it. It all just fell into place. Maybe that was the spirit of Elvis, coming back and guiding us along."
Billy got a stronger jolt from the blue when his cell phone rang and the caller I.D. spelled out Graceland. "That was so cool! Elvis on the line!" It turned out to be an invitation from [Elvis cronie and DJ] George Klein to appear on a radio show. But Billy and Shawn often ponder what Elvis would be like today if he had lived. The two wrote a song about it, which they may include on a second volume. Which seems sorely needed. After they finished volume one, Billy realized, "God, we forgot to do 'Blue Moon of Kentucky!'"
Chances are, Elvis will haunt them until they make it right. The polite Mr. Presley will want to repay Bill Monroe for the favor of a song that started it all. Thirty years after his death, Elvis is still influencing a broad spectrum of genres, even as he once borrowed from them.
- Alanna Nash
The Pilgrim: A Celebration of Kris Kristofferson
Grammy-Winners, Legends, Friends & Fans Interpret the Poetry of an Icon/Outlaw
When Beautiful Dreamer: The Songs of Stephen Foster, America Roots Publishing's inaugural release, won the Best Traditional Folk Album Grammy, founder Tamara Saviano and VP Tom Frouge knew it would take something special to follow their launch project.
Thankfully, that inspiration was already in the family--Saviano's longtime client, friend and mentor Kris Kristofferson, whose songwriting--often overlooked in the fullness of his superstardom--defined the intersection of genuine poetry, human fragility and the quest for love, dignity and personal freedom.
With 18 songs spanning the breadth of Kristofferson's career - tendered by an expansive roster of artists across myriad genres (R&B's silken Brian McKnight caressing "Me & Bobby McGee," Latina songstress Marta Gomez embracing the humanistic protest of "The Circle" and Patti Griffin with Charanga Cakewalk on an austere "Sandinista," popfringe writers Lloyd Cole & Jill Sobule entangling "For The Good Times" and Oscar-winner Russell Crowe's heroistic turn on "Darby's Castle"), The Pilgrim offers testament to the truth, timelessness and timeliness of the former Rhodes Scholar, Country Music Hall of Famer and original Outlaw's work.
Starting with "family," Frouge and Saviano went to those closest: Rosanne Cash ("Lovin' Him Was Easier"), Willie Nelson ("The Legend"), Jessi Colter ("The Captive") and Shooter Jennings ("The Silver Tongued Devil & I") - and then expanded out to include old friends like Marshall Chapman ("Jesus Was A Capricorn"), Emmylou Harris ("The Pilgrim: Chapter 33"), Texans in Rodney Crowell ("Come Sundown") and Bruce Robison & Kelly Willis ("Help Me Make It Through The Night") and Music Row rebels and refugees, worn for the wear but true believers in song Todd Snider ("Maybe You Heard"), Shawn Camp ("Why Me") and Gretchen Wilson ("Sunday Morning Coming Down").
Produced by Grammy-winner Randy Scruggs (Will The Circle Be Unbroken, Vol. 2), who contributes the breathtaking instrumental "Smile at Me Again," and featuring a 1970 demo from Kristofferson of "Please Don't Tell Me How The Story Ends," along with brilliantly written extensive liner notes by The Tennessean music writer Peter Cooper, The Pilgrim is a legacy of love.
Begun as a way to maintain the artistic standards and integrity of a burgeoning organization built on principles, not profit, their sophomore release quickly blossomed into something far more personal.
Music journalists have always remarked on how Kris writes a lot about freedom, but what he's really writing about is love and life," Saviano says. "There are many people who don't know Kris as a songwriter--and to us, that's the most important part of his storied career. Hopefully with this record, it'll be obvious how much Kris changed the way we all live, love and feel about our place in the world. Like Stephen Foster before him, I believe Kris's songs are classics and generations after us will celebrate him as one of America's greatest songwriters."
"It's been so humbling to work on this project," says Frouge. "Kris Kristofferson is one of my all-time favorite songwriters but beyond that he is a person I greatly admire--a man who has always stood fast for human rights and justice, for the displaced, here and abroad, and has never flinched. Our goal for this tribute is to reflect both of these aspects. If Kris had only written 'Sunday Morning Coming Down' and 'Me & Bobby McGee' he would be canonized as one of our greatest songwriters--but his catalogue and it's varied subject matter is as expansive as his influence and his unselfish motivation to create awareness on issues with global, philosophical and emotional significance. Kristofferson is a national treasure and while he has been celebrated for his achievements, this tribute--and the artists involved-- focuses on the breadth and scope of a career and a life of honesty and integrity lived without compromise."
For more information on The Pilgrim: A Celebration of Kris Kristofferson contact:
Annie Mosher / Ellis Creative / annie@ellis-creative.com
Gretchen Wilson sings "Sunday Morning Coming Down" for The Pilgrim: A Celebration of Kris Kristofferson
Country music star Gretchen Wilson took time out of her busy schedule to sing "Sunday Morning Coming Down" for the upcoming tribute album The Pilgrim: A Celebration of Kris Kristofferson. The album will be released by American Roots Publishing on June 27 in honor of Kristofferson's 70th birthday. The Pilgrim is a follow up to the Grammy-winning Beautiful Dreamer: The Songs of Stephen Foster. The compilation producer is Randy Scruggs.
"Sunday Morning Coming Down" was recorded in Buddy Miller's studio. Steve Fishell and Wilson produced the track, which includes Jon Randall on guitar and harmony vocals, Larry Atamanuik on drums, Byron House on stand up bass and Phil Madeira on keyboard. Miller engineered the session.
In addtion to Wilson, other artists included on The Pilgrim: A Celebration of Kris Kristofferson include: Willie Nelson, Rosanne Cash, Jessi Colter, Shooter Jennings, Emmylou Harris & Friends (Jon Randall, Sam Bush, Byron House, Randy Scruggs), Rodney Crowell, Russell Crowe & The Ordinary Fear of God, Patty Griffin & Charanga Cakewalk, Todd Snider, Shawn Camp, Bruce Robison & Kelly Willis, Marshall Chapman, Lloyd Cole & Jill Sobule, Marta Gomez, Brian McKnight, and Randy Scruggs.
For more information contact:
Tamara Saviano / Ellis Creative / tamara@ellis-creative.com
Beautiful Dreamer: The Songs of Stephen Foster Wins Grammy Award for Best Traditional Folk Album
Beautiful Dreamer: The Songs of Stephen Foster won a Grammy Award for Best Traditional Folk Album on Sunday February 13, 2005at the 47th Annual Grammy Awards Pre-Telecast. Congratulations to producers Steve Fishell, David Macias and Tamara Saviano along with contributing artists Raul Malo, Alison Krass, Yo Yo Ma, Edgar Meyer, Mark O'Connor, BR5 49, Alvin Youngblood Hart, Judith Edelman, The Duhks, John Prine, Henry Kaiser, Beth Nielsen Chapman, David Ball, Michelle Shocked, Pete Anderson, Grey DeLisle, Mavis Staples, Ollabelle, Roger McGuinn, Suzy Bogguss, Will Barrow and Ron Sexsmith. We'd also like to congratulate our engineer, the mighty Dave Sinko for the TLC he put into this recording. Thanks also to all the musicians, track producers, promotional team and the small army of people it took to get this record made. We couldn't have done it without your time and talent.