Her debut concert at Carnegie Hall, one of the most iconic venues in the United Sates, was only six days away and Ines Trickovic was becoming anxious.
The singer was well aware of the impact that the night could have for her career. She had spent ten months preparing for it. More than 700 emails, meetings and phone calls had been needed to make it happen. All her savings were invested in it.
“I’m nervous… This might be the most important concert I have ever had,” she says, somewhat hesitantly, and immediately corrects herself. “I’m sure it is the most important. But I’m ready. I’m so ready.”
Three days later, though, she caught a cold. “I was in my bed and could only think: ‘I won’t be able to do this’”, she recalls. “But then I woke up on the day of the concert and I was great. Perfect.”
On April 6, she got up on stage, with her hair pulled back, red lips, a black tuxedo and a white shirt, to the applause of a practically sold out Weill Recital Hall. She shared her nervousness with the audience, cracked jokes to shake off the pressure and assured everyone that that night she would open her heart to them.
With the help of a sextet of musicians, she shared songs from Tales of Quiet Lands and Other Stories, the album she recorded last year in New York, and even became emotional a few times. In the end, she bowed, and thanked the audience for the standing ovation they offered her.
Days before, in a message posted on Facebook, Ines had shared the “craziness” that putting the show together had been.
“The whole procedure took me around ten months and more than 700 emails, proposals, meetings, calls, and endless paperwork,” she explained. “And, in the end, I also put my whole savings into this show and the new album, without knowing if I would ever get a cent back. Madness? Maybe. Passion? For sure. Infatuation for beauty? Yes. But I would say it’s simply an artist’s passion.”
The road to New York, and to this show at Carnegie Hall, started back in 2014, the year many changes happened in her life. Besides being the year in which she won a “Porim”, the most important music award in Croatia, it was also the year she got married to photographer, producer and director Ao Ieong Weng Fong and moved to Macau. And she got invited to participate in the All Souls At Sundown concert in New York, by one the most famous jazz pianists, Aaron Goldberg.
“This concert opened up many doors for me,” she says. “We believe the world is too big and there’s no way you can know everybody. But in the jazz world, when you reach a certain level, it is surprisingly small. Everybody knows each other.”
Months later, she was being represented by New York Artist Management and working with saxophonist Bryan Gurley, author of some of the songs on the new album.
In April of last year, after months of preparation, she came to New York and recorded the new album in two nights. Songs like Colored Boy, are fragile and heavenly, while others are more aggressive, like the spooky Daymare, about racism. There’s also Little Girl, which Ines wrote on an out-of-tune piano, where she speaks directly to her three-year-old self.
“This album is me,” she says. “It’s very personal. People will learn a lot about me and where I have been.”
The musicians who joined Ines on the new album also shared the stage with her at Carnegie Hall. Besides Bryan Gurley, there was Julian Shore (piano), Gilad Hekselman (guitar), Marion Ross III (trumpet), Shin Sakaino (double bass), and Marcus Gilmore (drums).
“I still can’t believe I’m working with these people. A few years ago I was listening to their CDs and now I’m on stage with them,” she says of the group. “And they’re also incredible people. Their support was crucial.”
Her biggest goal is now to take these musicians and the album they made together on a world tour. “I want to do it, at least, in Croatia and in Macau,” she says.
The Croatian community in New York showed their support at the concert, but the whole audience came from a variety of backgrounds. The historic jazz drummer, Owen Roy Haynes was in the front row, and at the end asked Trickovic to sing into his ears. She sang him Tenderly, as he smiled on.
“People usually tell me they like the way I sing because it doesn’t remind them of someone else,” she says. “I don’t come from the American tradition, which is so strong in jazz.”
She hesitates when asked about what a Croatian singer can bring to jazz, but eventually offers that it is “a Mediterranean soul with a gypsy spirit.”
“That’s very much the nature of my people,” she explains.
That is not, however, the right way to describe her music, she argues.
“As an artist, I bring to the table who I am. It’s all about my individual life experience. That’s what makes my music the way it is, my expression the way it is.”
Born in Dubrovnik, Trickovic moved to Germany, to escape the destruction of war as Yugoslavia broke up in the early 1990s. She now lives in Macau and believes that all the history of the city finds its way into her music.
“You don’t hear any Chinese instruments or fado elements in the songs, but it’s there in the way I approach composition.”
Trickovic sings in Croatian, Portuguese, English, French, Italian, German and Hebrew. “I also sing a couple of songs in Mandarin,” she says. “But I wouldn’t count it as an eighth language.”
As she walks in New York collecting personal references, her story walks with her. In a restaurant, she spies baklava and says that the pastry was a Croatian tradition introduced by the Turkish. As she nears Bryan Park, she celebrates a street sign with the name of Nikola Tesla, the creator of the alternating current electricity supply system, and a personal hero of hers. She notices a red rickshaw and smiles, saying it reminds her of China and Macau.
Her relationship with China started over four years ago, when she was invited to bring a cabaret show she created to Zhuhai. She says the country has been one of the biggest surprises of her life.
“Chinese people have opened up a lot. They are really curious. They want to experience everything. They are like: ‘give us everything. We want theater, music, shows, circus, and explosions. We want it all.’”
Concerning Portugal, she says a visit to the country is about to happen. “I have met so many Portuguese since being in Macau. I have learned so much about their culture. I want to visit the country very much, and I don’t want to delay much more.”
She loves living in Macau – “a crazy place” – but after two years living here, she says she still feels like an outsider. “I don’t belong to the Portuguese community or to the Chinese community,” she says. “That happens everywhere. It has been hard to find places I feel like home.”
In New York, though, the sights and the sounds give her a sense of belonging. She shares this feeling over lunch at a restaurant on 72nd Street and Broadway, on a warm, humid day. The place is packed. It’s hard to understand where the line starts or ends, where to place an order, or where to pick up the food. Many voices and accents pile up on each other.
“I love this. I love this energy that only New York has,” Trickovic says, with a voice that cuts through the daze, and a smile that fills her face. “This is not home, but I feel like it beats to the same beat of my heart.”
