A pagan for all seasons...
Roaming around the first eight or nine songs on 'Divine Rebel' is exploring the house of a well-travelled person who picks up beautiful craft work everywhere and has enough rooms to display it well; you don't know what you'll find until you open the door.
The rooms are decorated so variously you could imagine you'd switched homes by mistake were it not for recurrent little touches that say one person lives in the place with people she loves. And occasionally you overhear them, a small child telling her an alligator story, or singer with her man she joins in with a "That's what you're playing, isn't it?"
 Engrossed in the woman, wanting to revisit one room after some other, I spent more than a day in part of the house, catching little details. Then I remembered the rest of the album and was surprised when over a simple, hypnotic bass riff and drum pattern, Beverley Jo Scott declaimed a paean of praise to her body, no mere "reproductive hardware", its constant dialogue with spirit, and how men should be cool about blood and take milk as sacred.
That closing number, 'Little Girls' might have been heavy without an amusing, sexually ambivalent twist in its tail. Beverly Jo (that "mystery photo" of the 26th) has obviously been around and picked up all kinds of legends, as well as musical traditions. Occasional choruses and studio echo effects play tricks with her voice, but with care. In one number, 'Great White Ghost,' she even sings what it's like when you feel somebody else roaming your mind,,
"And in that moment
All my other memories
Will hush
And I'm a junkie baby
Taken by that
Old familiar rush.
But I am happy
That you still feel at home (...)"
when, one guesses, the end of the affair was a long time ago.
Like magic, my musical feelers have yet again found a woman who happens to be singing about where I am. That's obviously destined to be a "Why her, why now?" of this log. Answer: I don't always know, that's just how it is.
Sometimes BJS sings in French, very well with skilful lyrics, as in English with a rich resonant voice some tell me is in an Texan accent. I wouldn't know; she's Alamaba-born, steeped in gospel, soul and the blues, and is a woman who can rock and be old-fashioned funky or do a duet on a very beautiful ballad, 'L'Etrangère,' with Gaelle.
She includes, among mostly original songs, a cover of 'Nights in White Satin', performed without ornamentation but a sense for the words and a haunting side that gets you listening anew to a classic so familiar and famous. From the opening bars you might wonder, "Did I ever really follow what that song is about?" apart from being one lots of people seem to put on their "music to have sex to" lists.
I'm less surprised few people seem to have heard of Beverly Jo, since she's no American in Paris, but has settled in Belgium and was long a session musician who frequented bars and friends and thoughtful, gifted French-speaking or French-born singer-songwriters like Francis Cabrel, who have a devoted and well-merited local following but rarely make international renown. She cut some teeth on a single in 1990 with 'C'est Extra' by Leo Ferré, which is quite something.A wild rare animal, powerful pianist-poet and orchestrator, Ferré gripped my imagination on an introduction to him by my first French girlfriend. He went on to set great poets like Rimbaud, Apollinaire and Verlaine to music with an ambition of imagination that works wonderully in the outcome.
Born in 1916, Ferré came by the 1970s and 80s to stand for much of what the Mai '68 student and workers' upheaval had been about when it shook France. Most "survivors" are now dull establishment figures, but he stormed then and pursued his own singular muse with a manic majesty and genius.
I'm sure Beverly Jo Scott absorbed such influences, but she's a "divine rebel" in her own right, a strongly pagan soul who leaves out the politics. The new Utopia some sought and still do is not a material one, nor even a "religious" renaissance except to the extent whole worlds and people are lost without a sense of the sacred often best expressed in music. BJS is a woman who also likes to seek words to approach it.
Her house makes you feel at ease since she's an intimate poet of the small things of life and love, attuned to their lasting significance without overdoing it, and chooses fine musicians, mainly Francophones, to address them with her. The album is no glittering showcase of the musical styles her range covers as guitarist and vocalist since she's no star out to display varied talents, but instead distils her great gifts into one song after another, at home in the genres I've mentioned and more.
The reviews in French of 'Divine Rebel' are as turned on as I am, draw out a Patti Smith touch and speak of Beverly Jo Scott's sensuality. If Patti Smith is sometimes about empowerment and vocal power, then yes, Scott can turn up the heat, and that last link is to a trilingual web site now in the making, so she plans to do so.
Her sensuality is certainly strong; she knows this and cheeringly gives it a spiritual dimension and a brightness that would put her some of her songs on a list of a music to make love to by firelight.
I haven't reviewed her latest 'Cut and Run' live album of this year, but a 2003 one found through curiosity and synchronicity of mood. So much the better; it's a shining accomplishment that gets me wanting to hear plenty more. She's very good as she is, someone who knows herself and is set to have much to share for a long time to come.
...and a season to let faith take root
Just letting things germinate beneath the soil depends on which hemisphere you're in, of course. This break in a meditative period offers you a strongly recommended contrast to Beverly Jo in the fulfilment Charlotte Martin has just achieved on ''Veins'. CD Baby tells you of a "collection of inspired awareness".
The next picture says much about Charlotte, like a Martin quote from CD Baby:
"There is major stuff going on behind the fake smile, the grass we step on, and the calls we can't seem to return. Everything goes much further than people assume," she confirms.
I don't think Beverly Jo Scott would disagree for one instant. Both singers reach out to whatever that indefinable "major stuff" is, letting it in to their music and into a natural body consciousness.
 'Veins' says part of it, like 'Bones': these titles address and undress the corporal and temporal, fated to decay. When Charlotte declares herself "obsessed with bringing things into light", she understands how light informs the darkness and confronts fear and loss.
She's come a long way in less than a year. Here's what I said* of her earlier work -- and what most of us then knew of an American beauty crowned on those looks alone -- once she had drawn some attention with far more:
"It's so grim outside that a woman who once told Playboy how much she hates 'shitty weather', is a pianist and songwriter as sorely in need of a place in the sun as I'd like one to lie in today.
'I know I'm not anybody's stereotype, and I don't care what people say. People are going to write what they write and like what they like, and I know this music isn't for everybody. It's a challenging, classical approach to making music.'
PB: 'What was it like being crowned Miss Teen Illinois?'
CM: 'There wasn't really any fun in the contest. I did it to prove my dad wrong, sort of a 'Fuck it, I'm cute. I'm going to put on a shitload of makeup and win' (PB's 'Women on the Verge').
"The thing is
'Beauty queens are very shy
More than lash that meets the eye
So she jumps then wants to fly
But it's too late now
I'm in denial
'I get midevil on boy bands
I said, is anybody listening?
The way life makes the nice girls fast
I said, is anybody listening?
It isn't just a lucky chance
'And I'm on solitary sand
And all the bullshit from a man
But found exactly who I am
'I'll never be the vision of a girl who can write poetry
I'll never be the little black dress we've seen on Natalie B.
I'll never be five foot ten, I'm barely five foot three
I'm on solitary sand, but in parentheses'
"On hearing her EP, 'In Parentheses' (2003), Charlotte's music initially struck me less for the lyrics -- those come from the title track -- than how she does something unusual in bringing an operatic voice training to bear on her use of a piano.
"The easy acrobatics Charlotte achieves with both vocal chords and keyboard are a stunning symbiosis. This girl knows a voice can be a beat on a drum and a foot-pedal not just a part of a piano's mechanics if you want to make it a note in itself.
"Charlotte is 'cute' with a nice habit of hugging people in her audiences after shows. But she goes back, she remembers nastiness people dump on one another, and then, well, she's chasing a man round the room in her head, and that's pure fun.
"The iTMS offers eight 'Test-Drive Songs (Limited Edition)' and a modest title like that sold it to me on the try and buy principle.
To quote lyrics on their own is usually a mistake with a vocalist whose range runs from the sea-murmurs of the shores she finds herself on to hammer-blows in your head, but Charlotte can be so raw, she's funny.
"She'll take anything on, push and shove with the guys and the girls, suddenly somebody's dead and she's handling it. The 'Test-Drive Songs' bring out that (self-)'challenging classical approach', the near choral overdubs on 'Something Like a Hero' and 'Last Day on Earth' work deliciously, not quite à capella, but adding shade and light.
"You find yourself listening to those lyrics again, hearing a woman who won't pretend to be a poet but broadens out the emotional range on 'On Your Shore' and can only go up as she goes back.
"On Charlotte Martin's site, to sum up what she thinks of what she does, she's 'everywoman', doesn't just speak for herself; while she's no 'sweet 16', probably never was and adds a good decade to that, she sings bleak and difficult stuff, she's still taking it in, absorbing it, making it very beautiful sometimes.
"When she wants to lighten up, there's no great wit to it, but she's somebody you like having around the place. Especially in your head."
Those words took almost no changing.
It's now the far side of the summer, the shitty weather is back to stay for a while, Charlotte has become a poet -- to single out one set of lyrics would be hard -- and is rounding out apace as a musician.
Lives have moved on, musicians and women friends (who belong in 'The Orchard' nowadays) have enlightened my own drives with precisely the body-soul exchanges Ms Scott put into that brief prayer-sermon, which is saved from perilous, politically correct feminism since she is too pagan to get that intense.
Still on solitary sand, now on an eight-track album rich in emotional power, from the heart-wrenchingly sad to what strikes me as a strong faith in life and its challenges, Charlotte indeed went back to go up. We're all stuck "in parentheses" sometimes, then someone reaches out across the shore.
Just how lonely such changes made her was well described by Jay S. Jacobs in 'A Shore Thing' at PopEntertainment -- whence the picture and even word of how Benjamin Britten (hello, my classically minded friends) mattered to Martin.
I'll be listening more to 'Veins', having already quoted Charlotte on 'Four Walls' (its magnificent bid to reach a friend with bad blues), but not its further à capella strengths ('Under the Gravel Skies'), the fine 'Days of the Week' tackling killer tedium, and how her 'Root' style takes wing -- before closing with a fine, live 'On Your Shore'. Powerful stuff!
We're now promised (by CD Baby) the "sophomore full-length 'Stromata'," that sllly adjective again. It means nothing, sophomore, it's just a kind of music industry career marker on the production line.
This piece is about two now relative "unknowns" who shouldn't be, rewarding our attention richly with their tales of change and of growth. There's a humour now in Charlotte we're bound to hear more, since she still speaks for every woman -- and for we men as well.
If I were in 'The Orchard', I'd have a story about today's subway chat with a gorgeous stranger (who had an iPod problem, there's a lot of it about as we both observed, hers was easy to fix) and then a good tale of the luck of spotting somebody else who is music (sadly another man had already noticed this).
I don't since I'm not. Yet musicians like Charlotte and Beverly Jo have a radiance to remind anybody "obsessed with bringing things into light" -- a lot of us, in other words -- this can still be done in bleak times when it feels so hard to reach people who close up we might lose hope.
I didn't expect to write this tonight, but was helped through an overall gloomy day to keep the odd faith expressed elsewhere by chicks who soar on. 'Root' is right in its love and growth metaphors; one of those indispensable soul-food songs. And "soaring" is so right for Charlotte, here's another source of hope: others agree about the qualities of 'Veins', for I've just found this: 'Musical Discoveries' -- instantly blogrolled.
A place like that about women -- "contemporary, progressive and crossover" -- even boosts, on exploration of its approach, my faith in more of my fellow men since you'll find writing there devoid of the insensitive competitiveness that mars many sites.
________
*The words published about five months ago are the last of what needed to come back here after most personal log content since May was uprooted and moved to 'The Orchard'.
3:01:44 AM link 
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