Tempted album

Description

From Miss Black USA to Rock/Soul Recording Artist.

Ezina’s Debut Release “Tempted” Has already sold 10,000 copies. She is touring with her band across the country with hopes of moving even more product and entertaining more audiences.

Ezina, a Native American/African American Recording Artist refuses to be categorized as
an R&B artist due to of the color of her skin. Even though Ezina looks like your average B-girl as she steps up to the microphone and waits for a hush to settle over the room. Then she begins to let those lyrics roll off her tongue; her voice comes from so deep inside that it explodes from her lips, making whatever amplification supposedly provided by the mike a useless artifact. When she sings, she sings loud because this is a woman who demands to be heard.

Not to be outdone by the boys in the band, she wields a left-handed Paul Reed Smith custom
22 guitar. No girlie folk singer here. Just a rockin’ sista from the around the way paying homage to Jimi Hendrix, Patti Labelle, Prince and Rick James.

Where did this force of life come from? This woman is descendent from Choctaw and Creole stock – which means movie directors have no idea what to do with her. Ezina has also been known as Leslie Waddell, and in that guise became Miss Black USA. Musically, she is the daughter of the belated resurgence of Funk Rock, which migrated to her in Michigan on the down-low through cousins in Chicago.

Until then, Detroit radio dictated her musical taste and fed her with Patti Labelle, Whitney
Houston, Aretha Franklin and her uncle, Bobby Womack. MTV and VH-1 changed all of that. Bands like U2, Heart, Van Halen, Bon Jovi, Fleetwood MAC, Living Color, Cameo and musicians like Joan Jett, Joan Armatradin, Melissa Etheridge and Bonnie Raitt came into her living room and left her exhilarated and dying to own her very own guitar. “I wanted to be the female Jimi Hendrix”, she says.

Her first independent release- Tempted – only hints at this new world. With more of a classic R&B sound and distributed by Victress Records, the album is being well received worldwide, but Ezina wants to turn the beat around and upside down.

Being raised in a traditional suburban family, guitars were out of the question for the respectable young woman she was being raised to be. She continued her steady diet of rock and roll and finally made the plunge into the rock arena.

“I didn’t want to disappoint my parents so it took me several years after moving from home to
get the courage to actually buy a guitar and several years after that to actually play it.”

“As a woman in rock, I felt it necessary to play my own guitar to express what I was feeling as a
young woman growing to a different beat in a fast-paced land. I felt that I needed more than a big voice to get my point across. Rock music has continued to grow, with Gwen Stefani, Liz Phair, Ani DiFranco and Shirley Manson furthering the movement of women rockers.

When she describes her music in the album she notes, “It’s like my childhood, a little bit of R&B, a dash of funk and a whole lotta Rock and Roll.