Melanie Gabriel

Melanie Gabriel (born August 23, 1976 in Bath ) is an English singer-songwriter .

Life

She is a daughter of the singer Peter Gabriel and grew up in the English city of Bath. After graduating from school, she went to New York with her older sister Anna (* 1974) . Here she attended college and studied painting and photography . After completing her training, she returned to her native country.

Melanie Gabriel gained international recognition through her collaboration with her father, whom she accompanied as a singer on his concert tours between 2002 and 2004 ( Growing-Up Tour) and 2007 ( Warm-Up Tour). Among other things, she interpreted songs that Peter Gabriel had originally recorded himself as a singer, for example Mother of Violence . Anna Gabriel documented these appearances in her 40-minute film Growing Up On Tour - A Family Portrait , in which she described the concerts from her sister's perspective.

Melanie Gabriel had already started an independent musical career in 1999 when she participated as a composer and singer in the compilation Refuge , the proceeds of which went to refugees from Kosovo . Her first CD was released in 2002 and combined introspective poetry with predominantly minimalist musical structures that, in the opinion of the critics, hardly reminded of her father.

In the following years she entered into various musical collaborations. In 2003 she produced records with the French musicians La Jarry and Hector Zazou and performed with them. On Zazou's CD Strong Currents (2003), which brought together a number of well-known soloists, she can be heard alongside Laurie Anderson , Irene Grandi and Jane Birkin, among others .

In recent years, Melanie Gabriel opened her spectrum towards world music . In 2004 she recorded the CD Words, which was highly praised by the press, together with the Ugandan musician Geoffrey Oryema . In 2006 she started the Taïga Maya project with Belgian producer and composer Thierry Van Roy, which interweaves the musical influences of the Siberian Yakuts with traditions from the Balkans and Latin America. The musicians presented this unusual experiment in a series of concerts, for example at the WOMAD Canarias festival in Las Palmas .

Web links

• Melanie Gabriel in the Internet Movie Database (English)
• Melanie Gabriel at Discogs (English)