Jan Bell: Press

Jan Bell and the Cheap Dates completely won me over! Her melodies are rich and meaty....Songs for Love Drunk Sinners is an album of deceptively layered depth, really fine songs, creative arrangements and crisp playing.

Bell's music isn't strictly bluegrass, but her reworking of old-time country and jug-band blues is remarkably nuanced. It embodies the wide-open spirit of what has become an antic, hybrid genre.

Edd Hurt - The Nashville Scene at IBMA (See full interview below)

IBMA Performing Artists 2008 w/The Maybelles
Performing Songwriter Top 12 DIY w/The Maybelles

Top Ten Folk Albums - Village Voice Eddytor's Choice w/The Maybelles

New Orleans City Life Music Issue Top Ten 2005 w/ The Maybelles

Village Voice Feature Musically, Nickel Creek transcend here their previous attempts to circumvent bluegrass orthodoxy (essentially, a baby-faced enthusiasm and a Pavement cover). "Can't Complain" is a lushly arpeggiated ballad with a peculiar key change; a pretty version of Bob Dylan's "Tomorrow Is a Long Time" is Iron & Wine in all but name. Producer Eric Valentine (Good Charlotte, Smash Mouth) gives "Best of Luck" and "When in Rome," the album's most distinctive cuts, a dramatic slash-and-boom that rubs intriguingly against bluegrass's intrinsic small-room charm. With any luck (and some marketing muscle), this excellent album will find the Dashboard Confessional fans it deserves.

The Duhks, a funky-fresh five-piece from Winnipeg, do some transcending of their own on their self-titled disc, though their blend is more rarefied than Nickel Creek's. If you were an extra in one of their videos and asked shaved-head singer Jessica Havey what the insignia on her cowgirl shirt referred to, she'd probably spin you a long yarn about generational crosscurrents and the impermanence of time. And it would involve hemp.

The best tracks on The Duhks find a rhythmic elasticity in the Celtic and Caribbean musics the band fold into their banjo-and-fiddle-based repertoire. Their arrangement of "Death Came a Knockin' " throbs with a lithe sensuality that belies the tune's many "hallelujah"s; "True Religion" bumps and grinds beneath requests for a properly made deathbed. And in "The Wagoner's Lad" Havey and fiddler Tania Elizabeth challenge bluegrass's implied harder-faster imperative by harmonizing gorgeously about the miserable "fortune of all womankind."

Melissa Carper and Jan Bell, who lead Brooklyn's Maybelles, sound like they've known that (mis)fortune. On White Trash Jenny they play sweet-and-sour old-timey music about keeping it in the family and being someone's wife. Despite (or maybe because of) Bell's English heritage, she's much more of a traditionalist than anyone in Nickel Creek or the Duhks; her and Carper's harder-faster is a triumph for equal-opportunity bluegrassers. Yet they give such an unsentimental melancholy to the mostly self-penned material that you remember their art, not their science. Don't expect a video.

Jan Bell: Music That Speaks To The Lone Traveler. Once in a while you stumble upon music that miraculously guides your travels and eases the pain of the unknown. Here is an artist who is not only incredibly talented, but who has inspired many of the writers of So Elsewhere to explore.

Jan Bell's stage was the highlight of the Dumbo Arts festival.

WINNER Singer Songwriter 2008

First Place, New Orleans Sam Adams City wide Singer Songwriter Contest 2004

Well crafted modern songs...smartly conceived and capably executed.
Jan Bell & the Cheap Dates,
Songs for Love Drunk Sinners
(independent, 2007)

The Maybelles,
Leavin' Town
(independent, 2007)

Growing up in Yorkshire, Jan Bell discovered American country and old-time music and fell in love. Eventually, pursuing her dream of playing it, she moved to, er, Brooklyn.

Hers is not the only unlikely musical pilgrimage, of course, but this one proves to be a notably joyful one for the rest of us. Her commitment to American musical roots -- to which, ironically or infuriatingly, most Americans fall somewhere between indifferent and oblivious -- pays off on these two recordings. The Cheap Dates and the Maybelles are distinct entities, the latter more rooted in hillbilly song traditions than the former, but both document aspects of Bell's gift and also her talent for finding comparably inclined (and comparably able) singers and pickers.

Songs for Love Drunk Sinners isn't exactly a country album, not exactly a folk or a pop one, either. Even so, elements of all these genres show up in this collection of mostly Bell originals. Maybe "chamber neo-folk" is the genre we'll have to invent to characterize the approach, which manages at once to be airy and brooding. If the sound is slightly reminiscent of what you'd expect from the (currently in hiatus) Be Good Tanyas, that may be because Samantha Parton, a longtime member of that Canadian band, is the producer.

Except for pedal steel (Bob Hoffner), the Cheap Dates have a stringband configuration, with fiddle (Rima Fand), banjo (Hilary Hawk) and upright bass (Nathaniel Landau, Greg Schatze), plus occasional electric guitar (from nonmember Scott Garrison). But nothing particularly traditional is going on, just some well-crafted modern songs with downbeat melodies, dropping into musical territory with the Cowboy Junkies' early records at one boundary and the late John Stewart's last ones at the other. The songs and arrangements are smartly conceived and capably executed, and for all its gloominess this is a pleasing and at times unexpectedly moving album.

The Maybelles share two songs with the Cheap Dates ("Leavin' Town" and one called "Night Blooming Jasmine" by the former, "Across the Miles" by the latter), but Leavin' Town is more stripped-down and on the whole more cheerful, with a retro acoustic approach (Bell's acoustic guitar, Katy Rose Cox's fiddle, Melissa Carper's bass) able, for example, to conjure up the ghost of the supremely extroverted Patsy Montana. The charming opener "Cowgirl Blues" (written by Bell) is a dead-on send-up of the sort of tune for which Montana -- born Rubye Blevins, 1908-1996 -- could have claimed a patent: the Western-swingy celebration of the good life on the plains. The Maybelles' metaphorical home is the post-oldtime country music of the 1930s, when professional hillbillies were situated between their folk background and an emerging Southern mainstream commercial sound, though the Maybelles tip the balance more toward old folk than pre-rock pop.

The second cut, Samantha Parton's beautifully heartbreaking "Lonesome Blues," quotes the opening lines of the Carter Family's "Coal Miner's Blues," then goes on to capture with startling precision the spirit of an Appalachian lyric folk song. An actual Carter song, "Little Darlin'," joins the crowd a few cuts later. Among my favorite songs from that immortal musical family's staggeringly deep catalogue, it also boasts a melody that Woody Guthrie adapted for "This Land is Your Land."

Five of the cuts are Bell originals, including the title tune, a ballad with an edge-of-the-seat, cinematic narrative. Cox penned the traditional-sounding fiddle piece "Devil's Gap," and Carper the bizarre, disturbingly funny "Been Probed," an ostensible gospel song that improbably draws on images from UFO-abduction lore. Songs by Gillian Welch, Bill Monroe, Hank Williams and tradition get covered, in each instance with freshness bordering on wonder. No complaints here, folks.

I had no plans this Valentine's evening until I stopped into my beloved local Barbes, which offered up a big heart-shaped box of music by a pair of lady expats who sounded nothing like their native countries. The early set was held by Marta Topferova: the beautiful Czech singer who performs Cuban son with deep-seated soul. Since I last saw her, she's added some powerhouse musicians to her band, including Pablo Moya on guitar, Pedro Giraudo on bass, and Chinchilita on percussion.

The 10pm set offered the music of British singer Jan Bell , performing twangy alt-country with Bob Hoffner on pedal steel, mandolin player Sam Parton of The Be Good Tanyas, and triple-threat Jolie Holland, who played violin, guitar and piano, and sang with a quavering, melt-away voice. Bell said she met Parton and Holland "on the road," ending up with Parton in New Orleans and eventually meeting up with both of them again in New York. Bell sang songs from her debut album, Songs for Love Drunk Sinners, which was produced by Parton and is up for the Independent Music Awards Alt-Country Album of the Year. Just a magical night all around, candles not included.

February 15, 2008 in Roots/World | Permalink

Technorati Tags: jan bell, marta topferova

Jan really makes you feel each note...I was speechless that such soul and volume could come from one little lady. I'd rank Jan Bell in the top that i saw at NXNE.