A new Jennifer Kimball record is like a soft, sudden shift in the wind, something rare and miraculous has come into the world, the heart is pulled center-forward like the ends of a compass reaching for direction in the deep, wayfaring dark, a remarkable event to be celebrated. Jennifer's lyrics, like tree-etched-poems illuminated by waning sunlight, and her sounds, unique combinations of dissonance and harmony, ebb, disruption and flow, articulate worlds that are nearly impossible to forget. A music so alive and aware, so seeking. Veering from the Wave, Oh Hear us and now Avocet, a trilogy of the human experience. The latest described as "splendid chamber pop over and through which floats the unadorned and honest voice of a truly literate songwriter; a voice which conveys warmth without affect. The voice of Jennifer Kimball." 18 years after Veering, Jennifer proves, time and again, that the waiting is well worth it. What began as a birthday gift, in the form of studio time, now becomes a gift to the rest of the world. The unique and unforgettable art of one of our greatest contemporary voices.
A shifting music business landscape has turned the studio into a luxury for many performers. Jennifer Kimball had no plans to make another album after 2006’s Oh Hear Us, but on her birthday two years ago, she received a surprise gift from her husband, Ry Cavanaugh: a recording session with an A list of Boston players.
In a recent interview, Kimball — a fixture in New England music circles since her early ’90s time with The Story — recalled the sweet subterfuge that began a process culminating in her new LP, Avocet. It started when close friend and fellow singer-songwriter Kris Delmhorst concocted a story about needing to drop off a guitar at Somerville’s Q Division studio.
“I completely believed her,” Kimball said. “We walk in to give the guitar to Peter Mulvey, with whom she’s playing later, and I know everybody. I said, ‘Who are you recording?’ and no one would answer me. Then my oldest and dearest friend in the room, Duke Levine — an amazing guitar player — said, ‘It’s your session; we’re doing your songs.’ I just lost it; I cried, and then we got to work.”
The work that day resulted in six songs but left Kimball wondering if the experience was simply a great day, or something more.
“After the session was so fun, I was stumped again,” she said. “Now what do I do?”
Among the musicians at the session was one Kimball hadn’t met before: Alec Spiegelman, of Brooklyn chamber pop band Cuddle Magic.
“Ry thought I would love working with him,” she said, and it turned out that the feeling was mutual. “He loved the project, and he took it on.”
Spiegelman brought his bandmates along to make the rest of the record, and what resulted is different from anything in Kimball’s catalog.
“That sound is all Alec and Cuddle Magic,” Kimball said. “They’ve played together for so long and have this real chemistry. They’re all New England Conservatory graduates; that’s where they met.”
Kimball describes Cuddle Magic as “avant folk pop electronica,” and said Spiegelman’s production exposed her songs in surprising ways.
“He unwound them to their essential notes, from the way I played them back to him,” she said. “My instruments basically disappeared into these saxophone and flute lines. It’s magic.”
The unique sound of Avocet is another departure in a career that’s included a few. After The Story split, Kimball rocked it up with Maybe Baby, a Somerville supergroup that included Cavanaugh, Levine and drummer Billy Beard. She later covered Crowded House on her first solo record and has always charted an unconventional path.
“I’ve never really thought of myself as a folk musician, and that’s what I get called, because I’m sort of pretty to listen to, I guess,” she said. “But I didn’t grow up listening to folk ... and I still don’t really know much about traditional folk music. Even folk pop music was pretty far from my early vocabulary. I think I’m drawn to a wide variety of sounds, and I don’t want to be pigeonholed into any one place.”
One constant is the personal nature of Kimball’s songwriting. “Love & Babies,” “All Truth is Better” and “Someone to Read To” reflect her experience as a mother; her son is now 10 years old. “Reedy River,” written on her first tour after his birth, is particularly evocative.
“I missed him so badly,” Kimball said. “There was a heat wave in South Carolina [and] people were wading into the river in the middle of town in this beautiful park and I saw this woman swishing her baby’s feet in the water — it was so moving to me.”
The record’s title comes from a nickname given to her late mother, repeated on “Love & Birds,” the record’s second track.
“Mom had a friend who called her an avocet, an elegant, and to East Coasters, exotic and unusual bird,” she said. “Long-legged ... a little bit aloof, kind of beautiful. That was my mom.”
To mark the release of the new CD, Kimball will perform a short run of shows with Spiegelman and Deni Hlavinka, of alt folk band The Western Den, that includes a March 21 show at Portsmouth Book & Bar.
“Now that I’ve been introduced to this new form of playing, this is all I want to do,” Kimball said. “I just want to play gigs with Cuddle Magic.”
Gift started it all for singer-songwriter Jennifer Kimball
By Christopher Hislop
Ten years had passed since acclaimed Somerville-based singer songwriter Jennifer Kimball (who was one-half of the late '80s/early '90s outfit The Story) released her last record. Ten long years. Lucky for us, she was granted a unique birthday gift, and out of said gift came "Avocet." Kimball will be celebrating that release and more when she plays at the Book and Bar in Portsmouth on Tuesday, March 21st.
Seacoast Media Group caught up with Kimball to chat about, well, everything.
SMG: Well, let's jump right in and talk about "Avocet." Your first solo record in 10 years? It's been awhile. How does this feel? What all went into the making of this record?
Kimball: It feels fantastic. I am reveling in this moment. But at the same time, it's a little scary. The landscape of the music business is so changed. I am learning how to navigate though and really enjoying the new tools: social media, crowdfunding, bandcamp. In the end, the game is the same. How do you get anyone to pay attention to your little project?
SMG: What all went in to the making of this record?
Kimball: Well, the usual heart and soul, and disproportionate number of hours worked versus time paid. But this one really has an interesting story, one I'll get into in your following questions. The songs had been written over the 6 to 7 years since my last record. And in brief, there were three phases to "Avocet:" first, the surprise birthday recording session to start it all off, a session which captured four tunes, two of which made it onto the record: "Reedy River" and "Saturday Day." Then after Alec Spiegelman took the helm to produce a full-length record, there were two more phases: basic tracking with a new band at Old Soul in Catskill, N.Y., followed by many overdub sessions at Christopher McDonald's home studio in Philly doing vocals, sax and flute overdubs, percussion, bass, etc.
SMG: Is it true that the "beginnings" of this record happened to some degree with a birthday gift presented to you by your husband (Ry Cavanaugh)?
Kimball: True! Bit of an unusual (and fabulous) beginning to the making of a record. The surprise session was truly a surprise. I had no idea, not even an inkling. Ry enlisted our friend Kris Delmhorst to take me to Q Division under the pretext that she just had to drop off a guitar for Peter Mulvey before taking me to my next "thing." And Peter was hanging out at Q for some reason. All I knew was that Ry had asked me to keep my birthday day free and that it was beginning with coffee with my best friend Kris D. In the meantime, the session Ry had orchestrated was getting set up at Q; he'd chosen a band, chosen the songs, got the demos off my computer, brought in our friend Billy Conway to produce and Matt Beaudoin to engineer. It was an incredible gift. I'd been feeling unclear about how to proceed with the songs I'd been writing. And was looking for something new, perhaps a bit quirkier than the sounds I'd been making with a kickass rock band for the preceding five to six years.
So Ry brought together a bunch of musicians for this session who represented both worlds for me – new friends and old friends. He didn't intend to put the pressure on to make a record. It was just a session for my birthday – to record some of the songs I'd been playing for five to six years already. It was an incredible gift.
SMG: Music. Why do you seek it? Why do you create it?
Kimball: I can't seem to stop writing songs – or at least pieces of songs. It's a combination of words and music that I feel pulled toward. I've always loved both – writing little poems, letters, essays and playing little melodies and chord progressions on the piano or guitar. Hard to unravel all the mysteries that lead to these compulsions. But somehow they bring me contentment, a sense of peace, completion.
SMG: You've walked an interesting path in regard to your artistic endeavors. Obviously, you're known for your part in The Story – a major label entity – and now, as an independent artist. How has the industry changed with regard to the way records are made, marketed and sold? What is your appreciation for both ends of the spectrum?
Kimball: Well, the major labels basically played a dirty game, but they sure funded projects. The scale was always tipped in their favor financially, but the benefit for artists was that they threw a lot of money around upfront; money that put you on the road with a band when you couldn't have afforded it yourself. Money that paid for radio promotion, publicity, studio time, salaries. The old system of "pay to play" (for radio) is still in place, albeit for slightly less dough. But who knows if airplay makes a difference in this new era of fragmented listening and streaming. It's still the same dilemma of figuring out publicity – how do you get anyone to pay attention to your music? While you don't need a major budget anymore to make a beautiful sounding record, you do need to figure out how to attract and hold an audience. It's still about putting on a great show. And being lucky.
Streaming has changed everything though. It kind of levels the playing field. But it's still the major artists who dominate. Sadly, we don't earn hardly anything from getting our songs streamed. It's too bad that our performing rights organizations haven't kept up and sued the hell out of Spotify to pay songwriters for "plays." In the meantime, musicians have to tour harder and sell other stuff to make up the difference in lack of record sales.
I'm grateful for the big rides I had on major labels. They gave you such a lift in terms of publicity and reach. But I don't miss the bureaucracy and the lunacy that such a small group of (mostly) male executives got to decide which bands they wanted to "make it." Indie music making is a smaller adventure, but it's yours. Nowadays the model is that you reach far fewer people, but they are hard-won fans and they are yours. They actually listen, actually support what you are doing. They are not casual fans.
SMG: Somewhere along the line, you also became a landscape designer. I find this fascinating. How does this profession inform your music/writing? How does music/writing inform your design practice?
Kimball: Landscape work and design are kinds of work I've always loved to do. And to be able to keep your head in the clouds while you work outside as a freelancer has been a real gift. When I was in my late-30s and 40s, it was the perfect part-time work while I was touring – and then parenting. I went back to school and got a degree in landscape design from a program at Harvard called the Landscape Institute. And I cobbled together a couple of different kinds of work in that industry; I have a small practice of my own designing landscape for local clients – small urban backyards. I also draw illustrative landscape plans for a colleague in Arlington. With a pencil, I might add. I just love that work. Pruning trees and shrubs is still at the top of my favorite kind of work list. But I don't do that much physical work anymore.
I would say music informs design more than the other way. There's so much rhythm and melody in the initial phases of drawing; so much art in brainstorming. I've written a whole lot about trees – and some of that writing has found its way into songs. On this record, I've also taken three poets' work and basically written music with their words. "The Valley" (Track 3) explores the idea that just as trees are in a constant process of dying and renewal, we as humans pass in and out of the past and the present, the way the natural world does. "In earth, in blood, in mind, the dead and living into each other pass." That's Wendell Berry I've quoted and paraphrased in The Valley. About five years ago, I tried to sing a song naming all the New England native trees in the verses and two of their Latin names in the chorus. "Liquidambar Styraciflua" was the title. Not so successful. But fun to try!
SMG: You're heading up to Portsmouth to play a show at the Book and Bar. What excites you about getting up here to the old Granite State?
Kimball: I've always had an affection for the town of Portsmouth since performing with The Story in the early '90s and checking out Bull Moose. But now that we can hang at Jon Strymish's joint and get caffeinated while we read Proust – THAT is delightful. Plus it doesn't hurt that we can sleep at home after a Portsmouth gig. Always a plus.
SMG: What can you say about BandB proprietor Jon Strymish? Heck of a dude ... Great set of ears. Great set of eyes.
Kimball: Brilliant photographer, bibliophile, music fan, sweet man. Yes, heck of a dude. What's not to like? There are so many musicians from Boston who come up and play at the BandB because of our connection to and our love for Strymish. He has been so supportive of musicians for so many years – coming out to gigs with his camera and taking the most fantastic, unusual photographs of us working. Strymish is one of those quiet community builders. Generous. Supportive. Portsmouth is lucky to have him.
SMG: What can folks expect when they come out to see you play?
A great show! Joining me will be the producer of "Avocet," Alec Spiegelman, on bass clarinet, keyboards and vocals, and the lovely vocalist Deni Hlavinka singing with me and playing keyboards as well. I switch between guitar and baritone ukulele. There will be three-part harmony singing, interesting lyrics, grown-up love songs - like about reading to each other - and melodies/chords that people seem to find compelling. When was the last time you enjoyed a nice bass clarinet line with a baritone uke and two ladies singing? We'll play lots from the new record as well as songs from my first two records and some covers.
Go and Do
What: Jennifer Kimball in concert
When: 8 p.m., Tuesday, March 21
Where: Portsmouth Book and Bar, 40 Pleasant St., Portsmouth
The Story's Jennifer Kimball Makes Folk Music for the New Century
It’s an era of pop sensations jump-started on YouTube with marriages played out on Twitter, I know. The notion of a straight-up commitment to songs is quaint, the idea of poetic lyrics is overly hopeful, and the strategy of ignoring commercial appeal is… foolish. It’s an era when deciding to major in English instead of business is the act of a dreamer.
Love live the dreamers, I say. Folks like singer-songwriter (and long-ago English major) Jennifer Kimball.
Kimball has just released her first recording of new songs in over a decade, Avocet. It’s a truly original recording, a unique collaboration with Alec Spiegelman of the indie band Cuddle Magic, and a set of songs with the power to haunt you from daylight to sleep.
PopMatters interviewed both Kimball and Spiegelman to better understand why we can’t stop listening to Avocet.
The Story of Jennifer Kimball
Jennifer Kimball is the most accomplished songwriter and pure singer of the moment that you might have once loved (even if you don’t know her name) and then forgotten about. In 1981 she met Jonathan Brooke during their freshman year at Amherst College in central Massachusetts, where they started harmonizing and, eventually, playing duo gigs in the area. Lit degree in hand, Jennifer spent some years working on book jackets for Little, Brown after graduation. But the music was growing.
It didn’t happen overnight, but she and Brooke kept singing and—eventually signed to Elektra Records as The Story—released two acclaimed recordings in 1991 and 1993. Kimball wasn’t writing the songs and was thought of as the harmony singer, but, ooh, whatharmonies.
It was the early edge of a time when women were starting to make a bigger splash in the music industry. The Indigo Girls (another harmonizing duo) were making great records. Shawn Colvin was singing back-up for Suzanne Vega, and both were making cool, independent sounds. Tracy Chapman, also out of the Boston scene, had led the way to the pop charts for women singing real songs with real stories. Soon there would be Sarah McLachlan, The Cardigans, Fiona Apple, Lisa Loeb, and Joan Osborne. In 1997, the first Lilith Fair Festival would bring all these acts into a kind of moment.
By then, The Story was history but Kimball’s first album as songwriter and lead singer was in the works. Veering from the Wave came out in 1998, produced by drummer Ben Wittman and featuring Duke Levine on guitar, both from her days with The Story. It was something different, however: quirkier, more poetic, more rife with jazzy twists and turns, more… Joni-ish. Like Mitchell’s great albums, Veering from the Wave seemed like a travelogue in search of love (“Kissing in the Car”). A song like “Take One Step” can tell you what’s special about Kimball: a poetic story-song of flirtation set in Newfoundland and in a jagged version of waltz time—“Let my hand go in yours / Don’t look sideways / Don’t look sideways”.
Indirection, rhythmic complexity, poetry, and Newfoundland? Were she a novelist she’d be two-time National Book Award nominee Howard Norman. As a part of the music industry, though, you were supposed to move more product.
There was no more recorded work for eight years (Oh Hear Us in 2006), and then silence for more than a decade. In the meantime, Kimball was busy with the stuff that artists turn into songs: love, marriage, motherhood, reading, family, and the nicks and dents that the years provide.
Still, Music Throughout
Not that Kimball wasn’t making music. For one, she married Ry Cavanaugh, the musician behind Boston’s superb Session Americana roots/ rock/ folk collective. Their musical lives intersected with a who’s who of that genre and that town, including guitarist Levine, Rose Polenzani, Patty Griffin, and Aoife O’Donovan.
Both Kimball and Cavanaugh were connected briefly with Wayfaring Strangers, Matt Glaser’s like-no-other band that mixed folk, jazz, klezmer, and bluegrass. Kimball formed a band with Cavanaugh for a while (Maybe Baby), she sang harmony for all sorts of talented folks (Lucy Kaplansky, John Gorka, Kris Delmhorst, Tony Trischka, and lots more), and she even put together a project, Wintry Songs in Eleventy Part Harmony, to record some seasonal material.
But there’s a good argument that Kimball was saving up her stories for something special, for the right moment.
“I didn’t need to make the record,” Kimball says. “It’s almost impossible to sell a CD these days.”
“I’ve never been that person who has to put out a record every two or three years,” she admits. “I’ve always been impressed by those ‘90s singer-songwriters who can do that and have a nice career. There have been some nice role models—women of my generation who are in the forefront of music like Shawn Colvin and Patty Griffin.”
Why a new record now? “I do it because I love it, but also because I want people to hear these songs.”
Sometimes, too, the recording process itself is a catalyst. And that was certainly the case with Avocet. It started as a surprise birthday present from Cavanaugh to Kimball—a recording session at a top Boston studio. “The session introduced me to Alec Spiegelman and drummer Dave Flaherty,” she explains, who she knew from their work with the avant-pop band from Brooklyn, Cuddle Magic.
Spiegelman found himself in that first session because he had fallen into the Session Americana circle. “They are like my cool older musical uncles in Boston—an incredible collective. I was privileged to gain their notice at some point and enter the orbit of collaborators. I was invited to that birthday session along with Dave Flaherty, the drummer from Cuddle Magic, Kimon Kirk on bass from Session Americana, guitarist Duke Levine, and producer Billy Conway who was one of the two drummers in the band Morphine.”
After the first session, Kimball had whet her appetite. It was time to really make a great record. “I feel, now in middle age, like I really have something to say. And I think my writing has gotten better. I wanted to make the record and work with Alec. I fell in love a couple years before with Cuddle Magic and the music they make. I don’t like to make distinctions between styles of music.”
“I think,” Spiegelman says, “they wanted someone to bring some of the Cuddle Magic aesthetic to the project, I guess. And I think they were looking for someone who was a little outside of Jennifer’s musical orbit.”
Kimball talks about choosing Spiegelman to reimagine her songs and those first recordings as if she were still inside the excitement of it. “I know that he is a musician with huge ears and a monster player. He has an incredible sense of humor and still a gravitas. I’ve always been drawn to people like that. It was a leap of faith—we’d never even had coffee together.”
Folk Music Meets the 21st Century
The result is a recording that dodges easy comparison or explanation. Kimball’s songs are extremely literate and lyrically interesting; their melodies and harmonic progressions avoid cliché at every turn, managing to be beautiful and lush but still quirky; and Spiegelman’s arrangements bathe the songs in stuttering, modern drums patterns, shivering and delicate woodwind parts, chamber-pop use of vibes, cello, and keyboards. It’s a brilliant combination of fresh ingredients. It’s a musical meal with flavors you barely know and, then, crave more of.
“I definitely made two aesthetic choices in the development of this record.” Spiegelman explains. “One was to learn the idiosyncrasies of Jennifer’s voicings and her musical quirks, and the other was opening up the possibility of using other instruments and hiding the origin or her quirks.
“I had a desire not to reharmonizes or rearrange anything or in any extreme way to add what wasn’t there I wanted to bring out the existing elements while removing evidence of where they came from.”
A Musical Meal
Kimball—mostly—knew what was on. “I was very turned on by this process,” she confesses. “He never said that by the end I wouldn’t have very many instrumental tracks on the record. I would sometimes correct him, explaining that the key note in the chord is the 11 or something. I was so moved by his attention to that kind of detail. I put my full trust in his ears to create the arrangements.”
This is clear from the very start of Avocet. “Reedy River” begins with a few clarinet lines slowly intertwining around a harmony that could have come from a guitar… but there’s no guitar. Syncopated brushes against snare drop from drummer Dave Flaherty, and then some electric guitar (no folkie strumming, thanks but no thanks), and finally Kimball’s merlot voice—creamy but with an edge. Horns will find places to play quick flourishes, but nothing distracts from the tone poem of words: a pair of people along a riverbank who are bound together (“We threw our shoes along the steep bank / And rushed from winter into June”) but who are no more in the heat of passion than the water itself: “They don’t rush the way they once did / And neither do we towards each other”. It’s an adult moment and a love song of a different kind.
Most of Avocet is decidedly more funky, but in a new way that threads different musical styles into something fresh. Spiegelman understood from the start of the project that he was seeking a special combination. “We tried to find something groovy and exciting but within that basic folk music frame.”
Generations Find Each Other
The key to much of this recording is in Flaherty, the Cuddle Magic drummer.
“What I know and love about playing with Dave,” Kimball gushes, “is that he doesn’t sound like any other drummer I’ve played with. It’s a complete and utter joy. Locking in with him is a whole other thing.”
SONG: LOVE AND BIRDS
“Love and Birds” is a great example, opening on a super-funky groove that somehow incorporates bass clarinet, flute, electric guitar, and saxophone—as well as thumping electric bass. Flaherty plays straight 4/4 time that is stuttered and syncopated, derivative of ‘90s hip-hop rather than ‘90s folk or pop or even funk. It has a precise, insistent, off-kilter groove that remains unpredictable even upon repetitions. (That this thumping, modern tune also appears to be about memories of Kimball’s mother—a singular, independent woman compared to an avocet, a curious water bird with legs and beak of spindly grace—is perfectly fitting.)
How did Flaherty come up with such a killer groove? “He does something here that we also do in Cuddle Magic,” Spiegelman explains. “You’re not doing your job on a song if you don’t create something novel for it, some way that the beat is unique and has a relation to the lyric and the vocal melody. In a song like ‘Love and Birds’, Jennifer was already playing this very rhythmic, rocking-out pattern, and I wrote a bass line that was contrapuntally interesting relative to the existing vocal melody. Dave was negotiating in between those elements to come up with his part.”
The blending of generations could’t be clearer. Kimball notes, “These guys are all around 30, and they’ve had a chance to branch out. There is an intense precision to the way Dave plays, a focus. But it is never without emotion or feeling.” It’s like Joni Mitchell made a record with A Tribe Called Quest, to our ear.
You can hear it on “Saturday Day”, for example. Flaherty’s drums are, essentially, the instrumental hook, leading the band from the bottom up. “Dave is a fan of hip-hop and other music that really explores what a beat can be,” Spiegelman notes. He does the same thing on “I’ll Build You a Barn”, where the drum groove—almost entirely kick drum and snare in impossible-to-emulate syncopation—has a tribal quality that matches the lyric (borrowed, says, Kimball, from poet Mary Burchenal): “I’ll build you a barn / To hold all of us / The door will swing wide / Swing wide enough for everyone”.
With wise lyrics and grooving arrangements that simply couldn’t have been created 20 years ago, the music itself does seem wide enough to hold lots of listeners. “I think about the generational thing a great deal, in terms of how the music business has changed since the last time Jennifer made a solo record,” notes Spiegelman. “The way I think about making records—and a singer-songwriter record particularly—isn’t the same as how others might do it. Maybe some things are characteristic of my generation. But I was so excited to work on this record because Jennifer is a special kind of songwriter. Many songwriters of my generation don’t do what she does: she writes from her own, odd world of lived experience and musical experience. There is unexpected stuff that only she would come up with.
“Maybe what makes it work is that we’re the same kind of quirky weirdos across a generation,” Spiegelman concludes. “We found each other.”
Stories of Middle Age, Transformed
Lyrically, Avocet is intimate in ways that take some time to appreciate. “Someone to Read To” is a song that performs a brilliant flip. A story about the pleasures of reading to someone at night (we presume, at first, a child), it then has the narrator promise “I’ll be your someone to read to at night”. That is, the reader promises to become the audience down the line. Kimball feel that this song “is like the center of the record. It’s a love song about being content and being thankful for being able to read to somebody. I have some friends I wrote it for. It’s not sexy, but comforting. It’s about accepting things in middle age. And, yes, it’s also something about reading to a child or to an aging parent.”
Spiegelman found a way to keep “Someone to Read To” gentle while still letting Flaherty do his thing. “We took the voicings Jennifer had been playing on the song and turned it into a lead sheet and gave it to the band, and then the guitarist came up with a West African-sounding ostinato.” Spiegelman’s overdubbed flutes are like the words of the lyrics, “ris[ing] and swirl[ing] in the salty night air”.
“Love and Babies”, a dreamy anthem to the stir that every parent feels deep inside, is another song that surely would have sounded very different on another album. The lyric is full of gentle wonder: “With hope’s little hand wrapped around your finger / No beginning nor end has joy / Know it now, now is love”. The arrangement, however, tacks a different direction, driven by an off-kilter groove with a martial quality. Kimball explains: “That started as a little guitar thing, nothing to write home about. I wrote it on a tiple, a Spanish instrument with ten strings. The whole arrangement is Alec. Dave Flaherty had come up with a pattern on electric vibes, and Alec was playing the pump organ. The chord structure and vocal harmony were already in my head, and I kept it there over the elaborate, bouncy new landscape.” Add to that what sounds like a short, electronically distorted flute solo and you have something singular.
“It’s really refreshing to hear a new version of that you wrote,” Kimball elaborates. “I don’t need to hear another strummy-strummy acoustic guitar record, especially if it’s me playing.”
The most folky-strummy song on Avocet is “All Truth is Bitter”, a delicate song about a difficult break-up (“Then I lied to the dog / I’ll be back, I said / And he stayed, good dog / Cocked his head”). “That is her playing a retuned ukulele,” Spiegelman explains, “with fascinating voicings. And those are the precisely the notes that the winds are playing as they take over the song. But that is also a song where, the way she sang this was so sneaky and arhythmic that I didn’t want to remove the strumming.” As the lyrics turn from the second chorus into the bridge (“And the truth is / That she loved me / More than anything else in the world”), Spiegelman allows drums (a cool pattern of snare roll-and-hit) and horns to take over, giving way eventually to a fantastical instrumental passage combining flutes, electronics, and barely audible roll that builds, builds, builds tension until it simply gives way to the ukulele again, and the voice lying to the dog at end.
Finding an Audience
Where does Avocet find its audience? Will fans of The Story know to seek out the latest from the duo’s more retiring member? Will folk and Americana fans get excited about a record that mostly ditches a big Taylor acoustic a flurry of bass clarinets? Will the word spread from Boston outward, reaching New York and an industry insider or two?
Smart stories of love, community, heartbreak, aging, and even death are not supposed to land you an arena gig. But with music this original and spry, and with a voice as sterling and assured as Jennifer Kimball’s, critical acclaim ought to be on the way.
Like the bird it’s named after, Avocet is beautiful, fleet, unlike any other. Your ears give it flight.
by Will Layman Will Layman is a writer, teacher and musician living in the Washington, DC area. He is a contributor to National Public Radio and frequently appears as a guest on WNYC's "Soundcheck" as a jazz critic. He plays both funk and jazz in the bars and clubs in and near the nation's capital. His fiction and humor appear in print and online., pop matters