Her long blonde hair and strong, yet feminine, features stand out against the rich red curtain of the Catalina Jazz Club stage in Hollywood. Surrounded by her band, Tierney Sutton sits on a stool; her velvety voice warms up the chilly end-of-December night as she sings a most compelling and elegant interpretation of You Are My Sunshine.
This is one of the songs featured on the Tierney Sutton Band's new release, On the Other Side, which explores with mature musical and emotional complexity, the theme of happiness.
The genesis of the album came out of the band's desire to create original arrangements by recording multiple versions of the same classic songs, starting with Happy Days Are Here Again and Get Happy.
"The whole idea of happiness and the pursuit of happiness in the American culture started to be really interesting to me and the guys," Sutton explains, referring to her longtime band members, Christian Jacob (piano), Ray Brinker (drums), and Trey Henry (bass).
It was during the making of their fourth album entitled Blue in Green, a Bill Evans tribute, that the band's identity and artistic voice were forged. The album's success would win them international recognition.
Sutton acknowledges that she most enjoys the creative process of working with the very talented musicians and says that she never takes them for granted. If she's having an off day, confesses Sutton, she just sits and listens to them play. "It makes my senses come alive," she says.
Sutton trained for 10 years in Boston with renowned tenor saxophone player Jerry Bergonzi. She considers herself a student of the great spiritual teachers and scriptures, which have shaped her understanding and perspective.
"All the great scriptures talk about suffering and its relationship to the growth of the human spirit…The sort of narcissistic view of focusing on yourself thinking how happy, successful, and famous you are going to be is a recipe for disaster. Yet it remains the recipe that our culture seems to stoke," shares Sutton, musing on the people she knows who have achieved fame but failed to attain a sense of fulfillment and happiness.
"No one escapes hardship in this life. There is an illusion in Western popular culture that you are going to live happily ever after, and of course there is no such thing, nor spiritually should there be apparently. That's not how things are set up. This project [ On the Other Side ] ended up being a statement about that."
Some other songs on the album include Glad to Be Unhappy, and Happy Talk, Sometimes I am Happy. They range from joyful, to frenetic and melancholy—all exploring the ideas of happiness, contentment, what happiness is, and what it isn't.
Sutton grew up comparing herself to the seemingly perfect lives portrayed on television and films. She believed she was supposed to be happier, but has come to a deeper and more profound understanding: "When you embrace the more multifaceted elements of life, it's much easier to find peace."
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