Each week we'll take you 'Behind the Beats' to learn more about the artists that play on our airwaves. This week: Threestyle.
We sat down with the trio as part of our year-end BEATS magazine. Check out the magazine article below or keep scrolling for the extended version of our interview in text format. We also interviewed Threestyle back in 2021, read that interview here if you're curious!
Read the rest of the BEATS magazine here.
Jazz band “ThreeStyle,” often introduced as “ThreeStyle featuring Magdalena Chovancová,” is a dynamic trio of performers: Magdalena on sax, her sister Gabriela Chovancová on drums and Robert Fertl on guitar. All three are in fact multi-instrumentalists, and their single “Time to Shine“ has been one of the longest running singles on this year‘s national airplay charts.
Tell us how Time to Shine came into being.
Magdalena : Time to Shine is the last song on our new album Better Days , and you know how it is, when your album is nearly finished and you need just one more song, you might be a bit tempted to include something that‘s maybe not your very best … something that‘s kind of left-over and waiting to be used as a filler somewhere ….
But we said hey guys, that‘s not what we‘re going to do! It‘s time to shine! We‘ll keep our best till last and make it into a featured single!
So everyone did their best - Robert Fertl and Elvis Stanic their magic guitar licks, Damon Dae the fantastic vocal line, Gabriela Chovancova and James L. Manning the coolest groove , Lew Laing Jr. the keys and me the sax :-)
And now you say this song is the longest running single on national charts and top 5 on Billboard, wow, who could have guessed? We‘re over the moon about that :-)
This single comes from your 10th album together…
Robert: We‘ve been touring, writing and playing music together for many many years, and next year we’ll be celebrating the 10th Anniversary of the first release of our own compositions as ThreeStyle. At that time we could only dream about one of our songs being played on radio … I’ll never forget hearing it for first time on your station … it was pure magic :-)
Later on ThreeStyle won so many awards - Hollywood Music, Global Music awards , we hit Number 1 on Billboard, SJNT top 20 and Groove jazz charts, and we travelled all over the world making music. We are so humbled that our big dreams came true and that, over the years, we collaborated with our musical heroes and best cats on this planet, like Jimmy Haslip, Mack (Queen ,E.L.O), Paul Brown ... that means so much to us.
And the journey continues …
ThreeStyle is truly a ‘family affair’. How‘s life for you three outside of “ThreeStyle”?
Magdalena: Outside of ThreeStyle and making music we love spending time with our families, and that is the biggest gift of all.
And we love traveling, swimming, hiking, skiing, cooking…
Robert is also a diving instructor and skipper; Gabriela is a great golfer and surfer .
Yes ...and you’re so right ;-) ThreeStyle is quite literally a family affair! Robert and I are married to one another, and Gabriela is my twin sister! But the musicians we work and play with have become like family to us as well, and we hope people can sense the love we all have for each other and hear that great energy through our music .
And you have your own radio show!
Robert: It started during the pandemic - one of the stations asked us if we‘d like to do a radio show of our own! I was a bit unsure at first, I said ‚but we all have European accents, and this is an American radio show!‘ ;-)
But now it is actually airing on 11 stations in the US.. we were surprised that it became so popular. I said to Robert maybe people like our accents :) haha ..
For us it is a great opportunity to stay in touch with fans.
We have live interviews on our radio show with regular featured artists … Nils , Carol Albert, Darren Rahn ,Kim Scott… and that is so much fun for us and for our listeners too.
How has social media impacted your approach to getting your music out and finding new fans?
Gabriela: It helps us a lot - we really enjoy interacting directly with our fans, and we can reach out to them with new projects.
For example, whenever we have a new video for our current single on YouTube we can post it and just seconds later people start viewing it. Amazing.
But we don’t share every single little detail about our personal lives on social media - we’re professional musicians who want to entertain, not to bore!
What are your plans for 2023?
We‘ll be releasing a new single and an album ...We‘ve already written some of the songs, and we‘re also writing our 3rd movie music album ..the first two were used in Netflix movies and several tv shows.
We‘ll be touring, and of course we‘ll continue with our ThreeStylejazz Radio show with many more featured artists! All updates will be on our website ThreeStylejazz.com and, as always, we‘ll enjoy spending time with our families!
Keep up with Threestyle on their website.