Jeremy Siskind & The Housewarming Project
Saturday June 6 • 7 pm
Music In The Mountains • The Old Siskiyou Barn, Ashland
Cost: $25/$20 for SMP Members/$10 for students
Reservations: Email or 541-488-3869 for reservation
or by credit card using the shopping cart below.
Siskiyou Music Project welcomes The Housewarming Project, a jazz trio that moves with the grace of a chamber ensemble and sings with the soul of the singer-songwriter movement to the Old Siskiyou Barn on Saturday, June 6 at 7 p.m. for our first show of the summer concert series.
The group is led by award-winning pianist Jeremy Siskind, who – armed with a Master’s in English Literature from Columbia University – began writing music and lyrics inspired by poets like Jorge Luis Borges, Seamus Heaney, and Derek Walcott. His first collection of songs, which deal with love and loss, horror and heartbreak, are movingly delivered by vocalist Nancy Harms and colored by woodwind master Lucas Pino on the 2012 release, Finger-Songwriter (BJUR).
Finger-Songwriter was hailed in ecstatic terms as “one of the most remarkable recordings I’ve heard in a very long time” (MinnPost), “One of the best albums I’ve heard all year” (emusic.com), “the most exciting musical project I’ve heard in a long time” (Jazz Police), and “winsome…literate and spry” (The New York Times). Emusic.com placed it in its top 100 albums of the year (of any genre), and independent blog birdistheworm.com named the CD the fifth best jazz disc of 2012.
With Siskind in the lead, the band started touring in 2012, primarily performing in-home concerts. From the summer of 2012 to 2014, the band played nearly 70 in-home concerts in 18 states, making new friends and converting unsuspecting audiences into jazz fans. The music is ideal for in-home sharing – as Harms ushers a listener into the world of a piece with her innate story-telling abilities, Pino colors the music with whispering tenor work, mournful clarinet, and murmuring bass clarinet, and Siskind sonically rounds out the music with sparkling, Debussian harmony.
By 2013, Siskind’s songs caught the attention of some great jazz singers and vocalists Kendra Shank, Peter Eldridge, and Kurt Elling joined the original group in the studio to record Housewarming, an album that features nine new Siskind songs as well as four covers. Themes of domesticity reverberate throughout the album, which reflects on what it means to have a place where you belong. Housewarming will be released February 24th on Brooklyn Jazz Underground Records.
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“Siskind’s piano sparkles, Pino’s growling bass clarinet and its repeated ascending figure are almost comical, and Harms is wry and saucy. It’s a turn-that-frown-upside-down finish to an album that starts out dark and gets darker, plumbs the depths of heartbreak, touches on numbness and despair, and delivers a happy ending. Bravos all around.” – Pamela Espeland, MinnPost
“There is a classic intimacy to the piano, sax, vocals of the Jeremy Siskind’s Finger-Songwriter. Siskind’s piano is a mix of elegance and storyteller charm.” – Dave Sumner, emusic.com
“Siskind’s new project… seems to defy all boundaries while remaining totally accessible, totally engaging.” – Andrea Canter, Jazz Police
“Siskind’s piano executes every song flawlessly. But what is most appealing here is his use of the piano as a means of invocation…It is sophisticated, and pregnant with meaning, and never once degenerates into mere musical wallpaper.” – Dawoud Kringle, Doobeedoobeedoo.info
“It’s a chamberlike jazz-vocal effort, literate and spry, and it seems designed for intimate engagements.” – Nate Chinen, New York Times