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Upcoming Shows: Most Recent News: "IF YOU SPEAK FRENCH . . ." Posted by JAYMAY November 8th 2005 at 1 PM Mailing List |
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06-06-05 - JAYMAY Live at the Living Room, NYC - from WOMANROCK Every Monday night for the past month a waif of a performer has been entrancing shoulder-to-shoulder crowds in the back room of SoHo's Living Room bar, backgrounding the chitchat of Village hipsters with an ethereal concoction of lilting lyrics, wailed laments, clever interludes, and the sort of good old-fashioned folk that freely references its foot-tapping roots. As a songwriter, JAYMAY has a talent for taking girl-with-a guitar conventions and nudging them just enough left of center that your aesthetic sense becomes conscious of experiencing something new. She's mastered the sardonic, no-nonsense delivery that made early Ani DiFranco sound at once so personal and so tough, and that serves as such an effective counterpoint to the wispy sentimentalism of soft folk rock. She demonstrates through abbreviated pieces like “Letter” that she's not afraid to let a short but sweet musical theme stand on its own, unadorned, as the sort of ephemeral musical poem with which Tori Amos fans are so familiar, and she seasons old country tropes with contemporary sensibility as adeptly as Neko Case. But these comparisons serve only to illustrate aspects of her art, not to reduce or dissect it. Whether she's strumming along to a ragtime piano solo, whispering confessional poetry over faintly plucked guitar strings, or improvising a horn solo that—due to the absence of a horn—is literally tongue-in-cheek, JAYMAY has a style that's very much her own, and that style is serving her well. In the show I attended she bantered confidently with a crowd that barely fit in the room she faced, and that responded to her confessions with a hush, to her single one-liner with a roar, and to the gestalt of her performance with generous contributions to the tip-bucket. In fact, though her songwriting is accomplished and her style is singular, her real genius seems to be for performance, and specifically for the kind of laid back performance that invites attention rather than demanding it. She sits |
