Michele Ari

"I wanted to perform for people. That much I knew. Any time I’d see a performance, I found myself with a great feeling of longing and belonging. I knew it was what I should be doing." This is American singer Michele Ari explaining how she became a musician. At a recent gig in Chicago someone asked her, "How do you just get up there and perform like that?" Ari, who, by her own admission, had just executed "a few rolls on the floor and other moves unbecoming of a lady", had her answer ready: "I don’t think about it. I’m here to have fun. If I think about it, if I worry about the possibility of looking stupid, it’s all over."

Ari takes her inspiration from the late 70s and early 80s, music she finds "unique, rebellious, spirited and forward-thinking": Elvis Costello, Blondie, Patti Smith, The Clash, The Damned. "Give me Psychedelic Furs, Kate Bush, Robyn Hitchcock and I am content and inspired," she says. "They all just resonate with me lyrically, musically and in style, ideals and attitudes. They are all ‘different.’ There’s nothing cookie cutter about any of them. Creating music that is not ‘faddish’ or could soon become irrelevant is important to me." "Faddish" and "irrelevant", in Ari’s book, means someone like Tila Tequila, the MTV reality show starlet.

Many of her fans are old punk rockers, who tell her that she fills a void in today’s music. "When I look around for contemporaries I struggle to find them". There is a classic directness, a renunciation of artifice in her work, which perhaps explains why her first album 85th and Nowhere was recorded to analogue and mixed to digital, just like Buena Vista Social Club. She likes things "a bit primitif", as she puts it. That debut recording, described by Ari as "a love story from start to stop, cover to cover and inside and out", attracted attention in the UK – though sadly we have yet to see her tour on this side of the Pond. She believes there’s more acceptance of left-field artists in Britain than the US, hence her fanbase here. I was drawn in by one song on the album, ‘Nevermind’, and its opening lines: ‘Woke up in last night’s make-up, wearing last night’s dress’. "It’s definitely a song about loneliness," she admits, "a bit of madness and the downward slide you can go on when you lose your integrity in a futile pursuit".

She’s lived all over – Florida, Chicago, Atlanta. Now she’s based in Nashville, but not because she’s on a Country music jag: "There’s a lot of music going on here every night of the week. So, if you need to get out and get some juices flowing it’s very easy to do. It’s a place for me to hang my hat, hone my skills, find musicians to work with and places to record, all of which I have done and am doing. In that way being here has affected my own music because it’s rich with the resources that I need."

Ari’s feelings about Britain are reflected in a couple of songs on Mal a’propos, her new EP: ‘Atom Bombs’ and ‘Transatlantic Love Affair’. The new work she describes as "cleaner than 85th. It’s more pop and punk, though not a blend of the two". On ‘6 a.m.’, the opening track, she seems to be heading for rock-disco territory, another retro genre.

As for that French title, which she translates as "out of place"… Is that how you feel, I asked, like you don’t fit in?

"24/7. Don’t you?" was her comeback.

Photograph by Richard Call

Michele Ari on Bandcamp

First published in R2 (Rock’n’Reel)

Olivia Chaney

Singer Olivia Chaney is on a distinctive musical journey and, increasingly, people are sitting up and taking notice. I’ve caught this lady four times in the last year and every time she’s doing a different show. One month she’s mezzo-soprano soloist in a new classical piece from the Camberwell Composers’ Collective; the next she’s combining Monteverdi, Joni Mitchell and English traditional songs in a Topic Records anniversary concert on London’s South Bank. I asked her how she weaves together these different musics: "In my solo shows I’m trying to point out that they’re not disparate. Although I’m pretty analytical about what I do and trying to carve out a sound, it does come naturally. It’s actually a lot to do with taste – that’s the music I love."

Chaney grew up in Oxford picking out tunes on the piano and playing boogie-woogie with her dad, an academic. "I’ve always been an improviser, before I learned to read music". Happily, that spontaneity wasn’t lost during the formal training she received at the Royal Academy and the Britten-Pears School in Aldeburgh. You get the feeling that she thrives on dissolving one genre into another. She believes passionately that "it’s important to break down barriers and reach as big an audience as possible".

Latterly her journey has taken her back to English traditional music, via people like Bert Jansch who rediscovered it in the ’60s. "I wasn’t popping down to Cecil Sharp House as a teenager," she admits. "I grew up with the revivalists. But I’d like to think that my projects, the collaborations with other musicians, the solo concerts are about searching for some sort of ‘purity’ which is inherent in traditional songs, the ones that survive." Directness, immediacy, timelessness: these are the qualities she prizes in folk music. With eyes tight shut as she accompanies herself on harmonium, she seems deep inside the song, where lesser singers merely skim the surface.

At music college she felt pressure to produce a big operatic sound, but in some repertoire "it didn’t feel natural enough, ‘me’ enough, honest enough". Despite acquiring some pretty high-profile admirers in the classical world, Chaney still frets over the question: "Are they going to hate how I’m ‘folkifying’ everything?" She needn’t worry. In an environment where drum’n’bass star Goldie gets premiered at the Proms, even the stuffed shirts of the classical establishment are loosening their ties.

She is about to embark on her biggest venture yet: a world tour with electronica and trip-hop pioneers Zero 7. "Someone recommended me," she explains. "Surprisingly, they’re huge fans of what I do, my solo singing. They pride themselves on being eclectic: Henry Binns [one half of the band’s core membership] has very open ears to sparser, more traditional stuff." She hopes to bring something more direct and earthy to their sound but recognises "it’ll be a fascinating challenge to maintain my identity and my artistic search within quite a ‘poppy’, commercial thing."

Meanwhile her own songwriting has been put on hold. She’s so steeped in the singer-songwriter genre (Dylan, Neil Young, Sandy Denny are all high on her playlist) that she’s a bit intimidated by what’s been achieved by others. "A friend of mine once said, ‘If you try and be original, that’s exactly the time when you won’t be’." So she’s waiting for the songs to come as naturally as the leaves to a tree. Doubtless some will find their way onto the solo album she plans to start recording shortly. Expect to see guest contributions from her numerous collaborators over the years, a colourful range of musicians spanning early music, jazz and folk.

Oh, and did I mention that Ms Chaney has just made her professional acting debut in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida at the Globe Theatre? The poet Lorca described life as "a giant labyrinth of intersecting crossroads"; Chaney’s life as performer seems to be just that.

Olivia Chaney official website

First published in R2 (Rock’n’Reel) Nov/Dec 2009

Welcome

A couple of years ago, over on my other blog, I wrote:

I have a plan, long in gestation, quixotic in ambition, to found a new popular music magazine. It will carry articles combining documented facts with biographical insights, broad cultural context with precise (but not forbiddingly technical) discussion of words and music and their interrelations. In its field of view it will accommodate makers of music and consumers and every mediating jobsworth and technology that comes between them. But though it dares to inhabit the no-man’s land between Brixton Academy and the Oxbridge academy, it won’t be all serious. Provisionally, this magazine, I call it Brush on Drum, adapting a favourite line from one of my favourite artists, Laura Nyro: ‘A rush on rum / of brush and drum’ (New York Tendaberry, 1969). Is anyone with me?

Well, times are perilous for magazine launches, but I thought I’d make a start by laying out some of my own wares; and that’s what you’ll find here. I hope you like it.

(By the way, the header photo shows The Bookhouse Boys, whom I plan to write about shortly.)