Jazz is an infinitely malleable art form, and Andrea Fultz may be
the first vocalist to stretch the music in such a convincingly Teutonic
direction. A singer who combines a thespian’s emotional
resourcefulness with a jazz vocalist’s rhythmic flexibility, Fultz can
infuse fresh drama to American Songbook standards, croon lilting
bossa novas, and keep a dance floor gyrating with insinuating
electronica grooves. But the Munich-born Fultz defines herself with
The German Projekt, a tough, unsentimental new album that
plunges jazz into deliciously dangerous water

More than a singular cultural synthesis, The German Projekt is a
riveting musical journey that brings Fultz’s savvy jazz sensibility to the
sardonic Weimar repertoire of Kurt Weill, Bertolt Brecht, Friedrich
Hollaender, and Hanns Eisler. While jazz musicians have long
embraced a handful of Weill songs (“Mack the Knife,” “My Ship,”
“September Song”), Fultz delivers most of the music in German,
setting the sturdy songspiel melodies to beautifully calibrated, jazz-
infused arrangements. “It is a big thing for me to represent German
culture in America,” Fultz says. “I really think this music is brilliant.
Brecht and Weill and Hollaender are so timeless."

The album’s only two English language songs offer a strong indication
of Fultz’s thematic range. "Alabama Song", the rollicking opening
track, is a scorching, bluesy tune made famous in the 1930 Brecht-
Weill opera Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (where it was
originally performed in Brecht’s idiosyncratic English). Many Americans
discovered the tune on The Doors’ debut album, but in Fultz’s hands
“Alabama Song” serves as an introduction to a topsy-turvy world in
which the usual themes tackled by jazz singers—the longing, euphoria,
and bitterness inspired by romance—give way to a much more
expansive world of concerns.

Toward the end of the CD, Fultz delivers a defiant, spit-in-their-faces
rendition of Brecht and Eisler’s “Song of a German Mother”, a gut-
wrenching repudiation of fascism. In between, she delves into the
bloody revenge fantasy of “Seeräuber Jenny” and detailed
description of dissolution in “Bilbao Song.”

While steeped in the politics and anything-goes experimentalism of the
Weimar era, The German Projekt was born far from Deutschland's
soil, and that just might be the key to its exquisite balance. Working
with some of the San Francisco Bay Area’s top improvisers and
arrangers, Fultz honed a repertoire of classic German cabaret songs,
embracing the genre’s inherent theatricality while interpreting the
music with improvisational skills gleaned from some of the world’s
finest jazz singers.

In many ways, The German Projekt reflects the hybrid nature of
Fultz’s life and upbringing. Her father was an American serviceman on
leave from Vietnam when he met Fultz’s German mother at Munich’s
famous Hofbräuhaus. She spent part of her childhood in Oklahoma
near her paternal grandparents, but then returned with her mother
and older sister to Munich, where she soaked up German standards
from the 1930s on the radio. “My parents lived in Oklahoma until
1973,” she says, “and I was born in Munich the following year
[September 17, 1974], but we would go to Oklahoma on vacation.”

“We were listening to music all the time,” Fultz recalls. “It was mostly
top 40, with some jazz, and the old German songs were always
around. When I sing them, it goes back to my roots. My grandfather in
particular would always listen to a show with lots of Weill and
Hollaender. I would say all Germans have heard these songs a lot.”

Fultz demonstrated a gift for music early on, singing in school and
church, and performing for eight years as a percussionist with a grade
school ensemble. By her late teens, music had become an emotional
refuge. Most of her family had returned to the U.S., and Fultz
assuaged her loneliness by singing, eventually joining a four-part
a cappella group, The Funny Valentines, that focused on American
Songbook standards and World War II–era pop tunes. “We gigged a
lot,” Fultz says. “I had the lead part, and all of the sudden I had to
learn 70 songs, ‘Cheek to Cheek,’ ‘Sentimental Journey,’ ‘Blue Skies.’
That’s how I learned the first jazz melodies.”

With her interest in jazz ignited, Fultz started attending Munich jam
sessions and studying recordings by Ella Fitzgerald and other
legendary jazz singers. At the same time, she was earning a master’s
degree from the Ludwig-Maximilian-University in Speech Sciences,
Special Education (Speech Therapy), and Psycholinguistics. While the
program was more theory-focused than she was comfortable with, she
ended up writing her thesis on the intrinsic connections between
speech patterns and singing.

“I enjoyed the practical parts, how we communicate, and how to
analyze ways of talking to each other,” Fultz says. “But I felt totally
felt out of place there, and I was so happy to be more and more
involved in bands. I joined a soul band, a jazz big band. At one point I
had seven bands, and was getting much more into music than studying.”

After graduating, Fultz won a highly coveted spot in the jazz program
at Austria’s University of Music and Performing Arts in Graz,
performing a freewheeling blues at the audition that impressed a panel
of judges led by Mark Murphy. During the year she spent in Graz she
studied with Jay Clayton, Tom Lellis, and Sheila Jordan, but ended up
deciding that she needed to go to the source, and in December 2002,
she moved to the Bay Area to study. She credits Lorin Benedict for
teaching her the intricacies of scat singing, and Madeline Eastman
and Rebecca Parris for helping her deepen her improvisational skills.

After several years of scuffling and slowly making connections with
Bay Area musicians, Fultz emerged as an important new voice on the
scene. At the time, she had no thought of immersing herself in
German music, and it was the Bay Area’s stalwart bassist/composer
Marcus Shelby who sparked the German Projekt concept when he
asked Fultz to sing some Kurt Weill tunes with his band.

“I had been writing my own material and singing Brazilian and
American jazz tunes,” Fultz says. “Then Marcus asked me would you
like to play some Weill stuff with me? I wouldn’t have thought of it on
my own. I had been in the U.S. for three or four years. I was so far
away from German culture that it was interesting again. Without him I
wouldn’t have gone there.”

Once the flame was lit, Fultz found to her great delight and surprise
that her musical colleagues shared her interest in exploring the
Weimar material. Joined by violinist Dina Maccabee, accordionist Rob
Reich, percussionist Micha Patri, bassist Eugene Warren, and ace
pianist Adam Shulman, whose credits include gigs with Stefon Harris,
Paula West, and Bobby Hutcherson, Fultz began to learn the material
as an adult artist, fully situating the songs in their fraught historical
context.

“The material was really completely new to me,” Fultz says. “I knew
the melodies, but not all the words. The dark Weill stuff was very
exciting. What made this possible was that all those guys are so
interested in playing this music. It’s like an honor for them. They feel
that as real jazz musicians, you need to know about this stuff.”

For Fultz, delving into The German Projekt has required facing
Germany’s dark 20th-century history. The composers and musicians
who created and introduced much of this music were forced to flee the
country with the rise of the Nazi party. Rather than an exercise in
nostalgia, the project is an homage to the bravery of artists who risked
everything in order to pursue their musical vision. The resulting music
is as beautiful as it is bracing, a powerful example of the way jazz can
intensify a song’s emotional pitch without resorting to musical
histrionics.

Since moving back to Germany in 2007, Fultz has continued to expand
The German Projekt repertoire with new arrangements by leading
Bay Area players such as pianist Graham Connah, bassist Marcus
Shelby, reed player Mitch Marcus, and saxophonist Kasey Knudsen. At
home with a wide array of material, she also performs in straight-
ahead, Brazilian jazz, Latin groove, and jazz/pop contexts. But
somehow, no material hits as deeply as the music from home.

“This music is about the context, it’s not about singing flawlessly or
bebopping,” Fultz says. “It’s so different for me to sing in German. I
can’t compare it to English or Portuguese. I can play with dialect, sing
more northern or southern, or be a little more rude. It’s given me
more freedom than any other music before.”