Half a band? Hardly. Their parents started something. Tia and Shamie are running with it.
Cellar Music Group
Tia Fuller – alto saxophone, vocals, production; Shamie Fuller-Royston – piano
No bass. No drums. Just a piano and a saxophone, and occasionally a voice. On paper, Dynasty sounds like half a band. Press play and that thought disappears inside about thirty seconds.
Tia Fuller and Shamie Fuller-Royston grew up inside music — literally. Their parents, vocalist Elthopia Fuller and bassist Fred Fuller, led a working family band called Fuller Sound, both sisters part of it from the start. That band cut one album in 1998. Dynasty is the second, recorded as a duo at Klavierhaus in New York in 2025, the sisters carrying the band name forward.
What fills the space where the rhythm section would be is Shamie’s left hand, hammering out repeated notes in the lower register with the insistence of a bassist or a drummer working the toms. Her right hand can spin melodic lines on top, the two hands playing countermelodies against each other until it sounds like there are two people sitting on the piano bench. Add a saxophone that can be just as percussive as it is lyrical, and any absence stops feeling like a loss.
When Tia sings on “Momma Said,” her phrasing has the shape of a horn solo — pulling back, holding a word a beat longer than expected, treating melody the way she treats a saxophone line.
“Windsoar” opens the album with a speaking voice and piano, the two winding around each other like a conversation, before the sax joins and the whole thing settles into something that earns a description you don’t hear often — easy listening with guts.
Standards appear not as repertoire choices but as inherited language. Sam Rivers’ “Beatrice” was something the sisters played with their father growing up — and they play it beautifully here, Tia’s lines searching and expressive, Shamie’s solo sounding like notes cascading off the keyboard. Freddie Hubbard’s “Dear John” opens with the sax taking off before the piano joins in. The easy swinging joy of it sounds like exactly what it is — two people who have been playing together their whole lives. And Horace Silver’s “Summer in Central Park” gets quietly remade on Shamie’s own terms.
Surprising turns keep coming. “Ode to Bach” starts with a piano figure that is exactly what it sounds like, before the sax enters with jagged, angular lines closer to Monk than Bach — adding squeals for emphasis before dropping from a high note and ending in a low growl. “Black Viking,” written after touring with a symphony orchestra, has a stately, almost tango-like quality — notes placed just so, the whole thing feeling carefully written out, yet you can hear them having fun playing it. Nothing else on the record sounds quite like it.
Half a band? Hardly. Their parents started something. Tia and Shamie are running with it.
