Festa: Jolie Holland - Wine Dark Sea | + Gruff Rhys

Festa: Jolie Holland - Wine Dark Sea | + Gruff Rhys

Over the span of her career, Jolie Holland has knotted together a century of American song—jazz, blues, soul, rock and roll—into some stew that is impossible to categorize with any conventional critical terminology. This is her burden and her gift, to know all of these American songs of the last ten decades in her head and her heart, and to have to wrestle with their legacy. She dives straight to the pathos of a song the way the very greatest singers, singers like Mavis Staples, or Al Green, or Skip James, or Tom Waits do. Upon first encounter her songs seem challenging, perhaps unsettling at times, but as so many poets and rockers have shown us (from Dante Alighieri to William Blake to Sylvia Plath to Patti Smith to Nick Cave to Mark E. Smith) that's where the beauty lies. As evident on her first recordings, Holland apparently has no fear of the truth, and there is no emotional core that she cannot reach in song. In fact she thrives on the red hot center of a musical composition, in all its strange and brutal detail. Note how easily the line “I’ve been taken outside and I’ve been brutalized” trips off her tongue in Joe Tex’s “The Love You Save.”

Jolie Holland has always embodied everything weird and wonderful in the history of American music, but Wine Dark Sea takes it to a new level. Raw and unrestrained, bristling with kinetic energy, Wine Dark Sea is unlike anything she’s ever recorded, but is also the purest and most assured evocation of Hollands vision to date. A joyfully unrestrained masterwork, the record delivers: louder, noisier, raw and visceral. It is an inventive and fiery reimagining of delta blues, free jazz, classic r&b and country, infused throughout with a no wave abandon. The album features symphonic swaths of noisy electric guitars and percolating polyrhythms supporting some of the most powerful vocal performances of Holland’s career. This combined with some of her most direct and memorable songs make Wine Dark Sea her most joyful and fully realized work to date. Wine Dark Sea was self-produced by Holland who mined New York's fertile downtown jazz and experimental scene for an ensemble of talented musicians including Doug Wieselman (Lou Reed, Antony and the Johnsons), Indigo Street and others. The sense of fun they had recording the album is tangible. Says Holland: “I told Doug Wieselman I wanted an Ethiopianesque bass clarinet solo on ‘All the Love’ and he said, ‘yeah, I got that.’ I asked him to give me a tremolo guitar like Pops Staples, and he brought that spirit through for ‘Dark Days.’ I asked Geoffrey Muller, the bassist, to give us a bass line for ‘Waiting for the Sun’ like a sweet boyfriend telling his lady he's picking up the whole bill for their vacation on the beach. I wanted it to have that comforting, manly vibe. And he hooked us up.”

Neben Julie Holland wird Gruff Rhys auftreten.

(Der für die Fahimi Bar geplante Auftritt von Gruff Rhys findet nicht statt. Die Show ist in den Grünen Salon verlegt worden.)