This Is
RYAN SHAW
Do the 45,
listen
or
watch the
video
Ryan Shaw is a man with a mission.
This 27-year-old singer/songwriter from Decatur, Georgia is
out to revive the passion and soul of the Golden Age of
Rhythm & Blues (1960-1972) for a new generation. His
debut album, This Is Ryan Shaw, combines a powerfully
expressive voice with a clutch of great songs both classic
and new—and a state-of-the-art, in-your-face sound
that makes it impossible to sit still.
Working with player/producers Jimmy Bralower and Johnny
Gale, Ryan dug deep into the “soul mine” for
overlooked gems by obscure artists like the Combo Kings and
the Sharpees along with more familiar songs made famous by
Wilson Pickett, Jackie Wilson, and Bobby Womack.
Ryan’s original tunes—“Nobody” ,
“We Got Love,” and “Over and Done”
—are most definitely of the moment but built on the
old-school values of strong melodies and meaningful lyrics.
Ryan delivers every song with the kind of emotional
commitment and vocal panache that have nearly vanished from
the mainstream musical landscape. Compositional craft and
studio technology blend in an album of irresistible appeal
from the opening dance blast of “Do the 45” to
the heart-wrenching ballad “I Am Your Man” and
“Over and Done,” the upbeat Ryan Shaw original
that closes the set on a joyful, triumphant note.
On stage, Ryan brings it all together with a combination of
Southern warmth and New York vitality. Using just a small
rhythm section and two male backing vocalists, he’s
able to effectively reproduce the sound of his album while
stretching some tunes into full-on vocal rave-ups.
Ryan’s thrilling voice and charismatic presence are
all that he needs to get over with an audience.
There’s no posturing or mindless booty-shaking, no
need for contrived antics: Ryan Shaw is the real deal.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Ryan Shaw was born December 26, 1980 in Decatur, Georgia
and grew up in a deeply religious Pentecostal family. He
began singing in church at the age of five and later formed
a family group with his four brothers called the Shaw Boys.
“We didn’t listen to secular or pop music
either in or out of our house,” he explains.
“So my early musical influences are all from the
gospel world—singers like Darryl Coley, Keith Brooks,
James Moore, and the Pace Sisters.”
After briefly attending Georgia State University, Ryan
successfully auditioned for the gospel musical A Good Man
Is Hard to Find (Part II). In 1998, he joined the cast of I
Know I’ve Been Changed, written and directed by Tyler
Perry (Diary of a Mad Black Woman). Ryan came to New York
with this production and performed to sold-out crowds at
the Beacon Theater.
After the closing of I Know I’ve Been Changed, Ryan
joined the resident cast of the Motown Café on West
57thStreet where he performed Detroit soul favorites by the
Four Tops and Marvin Gaye. Later he found another steady
gig with a group that he says played “just about
anything from the Fifties and Sixties that you could dance
to—Frank Sinatra and Nat King Cole, Stax and Motown,
Dion & the Belmonts, you name it.”
“With my church background, a lot of this material
was new to me. But when I saw how those songs affected
people, I began to understand how their own memories and
emotions were invested in the music. Now that was pretty
cool.”
The more Ryan heard of the sounds of the Fifties, Sixties,
and Seventies, the more aware he became of the missing
ingredients in contemporary music. “I’m into
chords, melodies, lyrics, arrangements—I’m into
music in all its aspects. It seems like the late Eighties
were the last time we really had all these elements in
Black music, with artists like Anita Baker and Luther
Vandross. By the mid-Nineties, we were down to two chords
and a drum loop.”
In 2004 Ryan was recruited into the Fabulous Soul Shakers,
a vocal group specializing in classic soul and doo-wop.
Johnny Gale, the group’s guitarist, is a New York
music veteran who’s worked with everyone from Hank
Ballard to the Ramones. Deeply impressed by Ryan’s
talent, Johnny urged his old friend Jimmy Bralower to check
him out. As a percussionist and drum programmer, Jimmy was
among the city’s most in-demand session players,
having worked with superstars like Madonna, Peter Gabriel,
and Steve Winwood.
One night in 2006, Bralower came down to hear Ryan sing at
a small Lower East Side club…and was blown away by
what he heard. He and Johnny Gale invited Ryan back to
Jimmy’s basement studio on Long Island where they
quickly cut four of Ryan’s featured numbers with the
Soul Shakers including “Do the 45” and “I
Found a Love.”
ABOUT THE ALBUM
The collaboration proved to be heaven-sent. Ryan carefully
chose from dozens of suggested songs and shaped his own
interpretations as Jimmy and Johnny “powered
up” the original arrangements with muscular bass and
drums while adding a guitar riff here or some handclaps
there.
Even as they reinvented such nuggets as Jackie
Wilson’s “I’ll Be Satisfied” and
Bobby Womack’s “Lookin' For A Love,” the
team created new original songs that meshed seamlessly with
the old ones. “The core songwriting values of that
period are so strong and so timeless that even many of the
non-hit soul records of the Sixties sound like
‘hits’ today,” says Jimmy. “Those
are the values we adhered to in writing and recording songs
like ‘Nobody’ and ‘We Got
Love.’”
“The strength of his own writing shows that Ryan Shaw
isn't just a great singer” Jimmy Bralower declares.
“He’s a real artist, he’s got something
to say, and he’s going to be around for a long, long
time.”
Our other new stuff! -->
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