Vancouver singer Krystle Dos Santos brings soulful sounds to Songs of Summer
The two-time Western Canadian Music Award-winning artist will perform originals and Motown classics at Gateway Theatre’s open-air concert
Krystle Dos Santos
Gateway Theatre presents Songs of Summer on August 27 at the Gateway Theatre Grove. Krystle Dos Santos performs at the evening event (7 to 8:15 pm); the afternoon event runs from 2 to 5 pm
BEFORE KRYSTLE DOS SANTOS had started elementary school, she was already immersed in music, picking up her parents’ love of it. The two-time Western Canadian Music Award winning soul, jazz, and R&B singer, whose roots are Guyanese, grew up in Edmonton and is now based in Vancouver. She counts Etta James, Nina Simone, Toni Braxton, and Chaka Khan among her idols and credits those early days listening to albums with her mom and dad for the discovery of an artform that does wonders for the soul.
“My dad had a small but mighty record collection,” Dos Santos says in a phone interview with Stir, pointing to discs by the likes of Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder, and Harry Belafonte. “He’d allow me to go in and put records on at four years old and spin them myself. My parents have a Caribbean background, so calypso and soca music are in my veins as well. All that joyful, happy, classic Motown music was always around, and that’s kind of what I was raised on. Today can’t stop singing it: it’s so happy and it relates to such comfort and good memories.”
Dos Santos will be bringing some of the feel-good music she excels at to Gateway Theatre’s Songs of Summer, Taking place just outside the venue in the open-air Gateway Theatre Grove, the event is the kickoff to Gateway’s 2022-23 season.
“Music really brings people together,” Dos Santos says. “At a concert like this, people think, ‘This is my music!’ They can sing along to it. You can see and feel the joy in people. It’s such an amazing, wonderful, reciprocal energetic flow when you’re performing tunes that people know and love and possibly dance to; it’s the most incredible transaction. It’s quite a treat to share that with people, especially outside in the summer—it’s the perfect combination.”
Dos Santos’s performance comes on the heels of a weeks-long tour of Hey Viola!, a cabaret-style musical that pays tribute to Canadian Civil Rights hero Viola Desmond, which Dos Santos co-created with producer-writer Tracey Power. Dos Santos also appears at Gastown’s Guilt & Co. for Underneath the Harlem Moon, a Soul-era show she curates and produces and that features different spoken-word and vocal guests every month. (The next one is on September 6.) During the school year, she performs for young audiences, sharing the history of Motown. All this, and she’s a mom to two kids, a seven-month old and a three-year-old. (“Two is way harder than one ever was!” Dos Santos says.) These days, she’s listening to the likes of Grammy-winning jazz artist Gregory Porter, local musicians Desiree Dawson and Ivan Hartle, Grammy-nominated Kenyan singer-songwriter Ondara, and whatever she catches on the radio.
At Songs of Summer, Dos Santos will perform a blend of Motown classics such as “Higher and Higher” by Jackie Wilson and “Just the Two of Us” by Bill Withers and Grover Washington Jr. as well as originals from her catalogue: her 2008 debut self-titled album (which won Urban Recording of the Year at the Western Canadian Music Awards); the 2011 WCMA-nominated Femme Fatale; and BLOOM|BURN, which earned her the title of WCMA R&B Artist of the Year for 2020. With foundations of soul, BLOOM|BURN features everything from folk influences to sombre jazzy sounds and from sultry whispers to angelic highs.
“I like doing a mixture of some of my original music—tunes from BLOOM|BURN and older originals as well—and pairing or matching those up with good old classics and retro-soul that allow for that nostalgic vibe to happen,” Dos Santos says. “I inject a little bit of that into my music, so people can see how I was influenced by that.”
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