Kait Dunton - Planet D'earth CD + Full Album Digital Download
$ 15.00 USD
If not for trumpeter John D’earth, Kait Dunton might never have become a professional musician. So it’s only appropriate that her sixth album, Planet D’earth, is both a collaboration with and a musical letter of gratitude to the man who changed the trajectory of her life. “This record with John is a special thing,” Dunton says. “It’s not just another album. It’s a bigger story. A bigger meaning.”Dunton met D’earth in 2001 at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. She’d been playing piano for 15 years but had no sense of turning her love of music into a career. Still, the Spanish major found her way into D’earth’s improvisation class. That’s when everything changed. He was the first person to show her what a life built around music looked like.
He told her she could build one of her own—moreover, he saw that she needed to. John D’earth was like a planet that reoriented the gravitational pull of her life to center around music.Fifteen years after meeting him, the idea came to her while sitting in L.A. traffic. It was an imperative: “I have to make a record with John.” She spent the next year planning and writing. In the summer of 2017, D’earth came to L.A., and they recorded for two days at Sphere Studios.
The result is a collection of new compositions based less on a specific sound than on an idea, an exploration of John D’earth as man and musician. “John is very much interested in the meaning of music, the emotion or story behind it, so this felt like the right approach,” Dunton says. She used facets of D’earth’s personality and playing style as inspiration to guide the listener on a journey, from fun and adventurous to moody and minimalist. Apropos of the concept, D’earth also contributed three songs.