SOUND CHECK
notes from the Northwest music scene

By Don Campbell – September 8, 2006
D’MONES DEBUT A SULTRY “TRANCE” – It wasn’t that long ago that Lilla D’Mone, nom de plume of Portlander Lillian Marie Naiman, was standing on a riser at Grant High School performing with the acclaimed Royal Blues choral group. Oh what a scant three years and some determination, focus and fresh input can do. D’Mone (the name is a mash-up of two big musical influences in her life, D’Angelo and Nina Simone) recently released “Music Trance,” on her Karisma Music/ Production label. It’s an impressive debut CD from a 21-year-old schooled in the formal disciplines of classical and opera, filtered through hip-hop and rap, and fed with her own jazz, Motown and pop influences. Equally impressive is her command of the music. She wrote or co-wrote all the material, produced, sang, and played keyboards. The result is languid, sultry, and sensual neo-soul and R&B mix that is instantly accessible (read: ready for radio!), yet shows a remarkable depth and musical maturity for a young talent. D’Mone has taken her influences and is pushing the art form to new places. It bodes well for her success. “I’m not trying to be big headed,” she says, “but it’s good music. People should hear it. I want to open people’s ears up to hearing other kinds of music.” Having grown up in church and high school choirs, and listening to her parents’ music, which included liberal doses of Jimi Hendrix, Billie Holiday, Simon and Sade, D’Mone began a synthesis of sorts. A self taught pianist, she worked her way into Grant High’s stellar choir by her senior year and toured the East Coast with the group. It lit a fire and set her off on a singing career. “At 17, I wanted to sing, but I was doing hip-hop and open mikes. I wasn’t absolutely sure about what I wanted to do. I wasn’t really serious. But after the tour, and singing in all these gorgeous places, I decided nothing else affects me this way. I decided to record an album.” Laying down tracks at home, D’Mone started taking them to the studio and bringing in musicians to augment the ideas that were percolating. During this period she moved to Los Angeles to attend Long Beach State to study jazz, but school was not a perfect fit, and she found herself working more on the project here in Portland. “I get more inspired here,” she says. “L.A. does this thing that sort of creates writer’s block in me. A lot of musicians here have shown me a lot of love. It’s way the opposite of L.A.” The CD’s 13 tracks mix classic soul, modern beats, strong lyric content and sinewy performances. D’Mone spent the past three years finessing the project, often mixing and remixing tunes multiple times in different studios. “I was going to put it out a year ago,” she says, “But it just wasn’t ready. The sound quality wasn’t there, the mixes weren’t good enough. When I write a song, I have a vision. That’s why I didn’t have a producer. I’m not as musically experienced as someone who’s produced for years, but they can’t see the vision as much as I can.” She did collaborate with people who she felt understand that vision (Syko, MyG, Talib Kweli) but D’Mone was very much the auteur. “I went through so many musical experiences,” she says. “I’m not an engineer, man. But you got to learn. You have to know programs and what kind of files to bring in to be mixed. So I figured I might as well. But I won’t have to go through that again.” Coming up in Portland’s vibrant hip-hop scene as one of the early female MC’s, and now with an album under her belt, D’Mone is bound for bigger things. And she has the jazz bug bad, spending most of her time honing that side of her talent. “If I don’t make it doing my own stuff, I’d be happy doing jazz. It just feels right. I think I was a jazz singer in another life. Hip-hop was holding me back. You can only target so many people with that. Now I can relate to any age group.”