Adele Morgan CD release party, free concert set for today

WASILLA — If you are a fan of live local music, consider bundling up the kids and heading to Teeland Middle School for a free concert for kids this evening.

Mat-Su recording artist Adele Morgan will release her new children’s CD “Dance and Dream” at a free concert from 6 to 8 p.m., Nov. 15 at the school. It’s her fifth CD and her first record that includes children’s voices, like her 4-year-old granddaughter, Harlee, and her niece and nephew, Kailee and Jamison Gumley.

Morgan said she wrote the songs and arranged the music for the project, then sent that work to Nashville, Tenn., where award-winning studio musicians cut the tracks and transmitted them back to her on the Internet. Then Jake Stone added the audio in Anchorage at Aurora Audio, who Morgan described as a pleasure.

“Easy to work with is a priority at this stage in my career,” she said.

Morgan said the Nashville-Anchorage-Wasilla recording arrangement produced some interesting moments, like a few times when she sang changes into her iPhone to the musicians listening in Tennessee.

Morgan was born in Canada and moved to Alaska when she was 6 weeks old. She moved to the Valley with her family in the second grade, but her roots here run much deeper.

She is the granddaughter of Kenny and Vivian Hughes, missionaries who operated the El Nathan Children’s Home in Valdez and later the Lazy Mountain Children’s Home near Palmer. After their retirement in 1958, the Hughes family moved to Big Lake, where the Rev. Hughes flew for Arctic Missions Inc. transporting cargo to missionaries in remote parts of Alaska.

Morgan said she has fond memories of her grandfather flying her from Big Lake to Wasilla in his Super Cub to play softball on the field where Sears sits now. He also was her earliest inspiration as an entertainer. Morgan said it was a thrill to tour the pool hall at Independence Mine in Hatcher Pass and know her grandfather had played gigs in that room.

Morgan’s had offers from Nashville recording labels, first in 1987 and again in the past few years. But the terms have never seemed to complement her life, to mesh with her own priorities. The first Nashville contract she declined was the result of winning a Nye Ford contest.

She knew then it wasn’t the life she wanted, Morgan said.

A few months later in 1987, she was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes. She learned to live a healthy life without a working pancreas and continued to work on her music.

In a serendipitous twist, much of her career and its success is directly tied to her diabetes diagnosis. A medical company contacted Morgan in 1988 asking about buying her CDs by the case and looking to hire her as a spokesperson to represent the company and share her music and story about her success using its new insulin pump.

“Music has taken me all over the world,” Morgan said.

The way fans connect with music has changed along with technology. Now songs or whole albums from independent artists, like Morgan, can be purchased and downloaded online from a number of different sites.

“Now the independent artist has a voice,” she said.

“Dance and Dream” will be available in CD format first at the concert tonight and later in select Valley stores.

For more information, visit adelemorgan.com.

Contact Heather A. Resz at 352-2268 or heather.resz@frontiersman.com.