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Tatiana Eva-Marie
Tatiana Eva-Marie sings in overlapping genres, with a touch of the surreal in how they mix and match and where they take you—French jazz, swing (especially Zazou), old time folk, gypsy, Balkan, Klezmer, New Orleans, occasional standards, and, recently, holiday. The heart of her art is French; where her talents would have gone but for…
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Rosalía & Raül Refree
Rosalía sang flamenco Friday night at Joe’s Pub. She has height, and lankiness, and long expressive fingers, and a perpetually sensitive face, hot with emotion and soft with a kind of yearning. The air seems strung with filaments when she sings, quivering above, behind, and before her, and her tremulous lips part from time to…
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Ensen
The Tunisian artist Emel Mathlouthi released her new album at Joe’s Pub in February and sings again in New York at (le) poisson rouge on May 6. The collection is called ENSEN, which means “human” in Arabic, and it paints a sonic picture of how it feels to be so in the world. To read…
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Xi.me.na
The vocal artist Xi.me.na wore paper at Joe’s Pub, which was only so surprising since, when I first saw her, at DROM, she was be-hooped in plastic. The clothes do not, of course, make the singer – the voice does – but they carry an attitude. Hers is fiercely self-assertive and unafraid of ornamentation so…
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Bria Skonberg
It was her sophistication as a storyteller that leapt out when I saw the Canadian trumpeter-vocalist Bria Skonberg’s “Love Songs from the Big Easy” at Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola in February. It was a few days before Valentine’s Day and she basically told love stories, both in her banter (which was word-for-word in both sets) and…
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Rita Redshoes
Rita Redshoes does, to begin with, wear red shoes. They were rarely glimpsed Monday at Joe’s Pub, amid the onstage monitors, but accented her black outfit assertively. Redshoes’ given name – she is Portuguese – is Pereira. Whether there is a story to the stage name, I don’t know, but it fits her art pop…
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Lera Lynn
Start with her name and her voice. They both speak of country and its close cousins folk and Americana. The name implies a pedigree that, so far as I know, is coincidental (assuming it is not a stage name: other than that she is from Georgia and went to certain schools, her available bios are,…
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Sophie Auster
The personae of Sophie Auster are ever shifting, and she unites them in a persona that avoids the fatal stamp of a changeless character. To appreciate her in performance is to grasp the fluidity of the shifts and the constancy of what ties them together. She projects herself physically and visually, and who she becomes…
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Blues for Dixie
It should not have surprised me that Allison Moorer singing about the South brought tears to my eyes. Indiana, where I was born, and St. Louis, where I went to fourth grade, are more Southern than is obvious from the map. A strain of my ancestry runs through Virginia and Kentucky, and the nursery years…
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Sílvia Pérez Cruz
I had planned, upon hearing Sílvia Pérez Cruz sing at Joe’s Pub, to make my way to another event involving music. But the idea of altering the state in which she, and the guitarist Raül Fernández Miró, had left me was practically unthinkable; the tenor of the experience deserved, as the profoundest of our aesthetic…