Gig: Baby Dee

Baby Dee (Josephine Foster)

The Music Gallery. Tuesday, April 13, 2010.

A double header at The Music Gallery of... what would you like to call it? Maybe operatic/sideshow avant-folk singer-songwriters. Whatever it was, there was a pretty full house of mostly devoted fans and the grand piano was set up at the front of the room.

I was a stranger to the first artist up, Colorado-born (via Chicago, and, more recently, via Spain) Josephine Foster. Accompanying herself mostly on guitar (though she'd switch to the piano for the set's closing three songs) she came across as a woman out of time with a pure voice and pure folk vision.

It took me some time to get into the headspace of this, with her vocal style more melodramatic and warbling than singers normally use nowadays. Almost an old-timey affectation — shades of opera (unsurprising, as Foster aspired in her youth to that profession) crossed with theramin-like trills — but for all the melodrama implicit in that, there was also a sort of reserved formality.

That said, Foster still had a warm, humble touch, whether in her performance or her somewhat enigmatic song introductions. Foster played songs from throughout her career (a half-dozen albums under her belt reaching back to 2004), including a couple from her recent Graphic as a Star, wherein she set to music some of Emily Dickenson's poems. There were even a couple that seemed to be fairly new and unrecorded songs. Ending on "Indelible Rainbows", she played eight songs before being called back for one more. A very appreciative response to her set, and during the intermission the place was buzzing with conversations wondering if the headliner could match that.

Listen to a song from this set here.

So a bit of a tall order for Baby Dee, who began with some effusive praise for Josephine Foster: "It strikes me so much how much her enjoyment of singing just shines as she does it. And I realized as I was listening to it that if I sang that good, I'd enjoy it too. With me it always like, 'aaaaugh'," she joked, giving a few examples her own efforts before concluding, "anyway, fun's over."

Everyone laughed like that was a punchline, but indeed it turned out to be a statement of purpose. Although it wasn't totally clear from opener "April Day", this wasn't going to be a light jaunt all the way through. On the whole, the vibe of the show couldn't have been more different than the last time I'd seen Baby Dee, which had a funhouse whimsicality throughout. Here we got, after "April Day", a mini-suite of songs from the new A Book of Songs for Anne Marie. "We're just getting started here," she said at the conclusion of that. "We have lots of dirges."

And dirge on the musicians would. Baby Dee played seated at the piano and was accompanied by Matthew Robinson (cello) and Sarah Alden (violin). Her combination of almost-exaggeratedly dramatic whispers and deliberate enunciations played with the same sort of sense of upended expectations that Foster had employed in her set, but Baby Dee was simultaneously less transporting and more affected. Which isn't a slight — she was working in her own style and doing well at it.

There were plenty of lovely musical moments, with a delicate interplay between the piano and strings. A couple instrumental preludes were very fine, as well as little moments like the quick pizzicato bursts in "A Compass Of The Light". Perhaps at the emotional core of the set was a stirring reading of "Safe Inside the Day". The closing pair of "As a Seal on Your Heart" and "As Morning Holds a Star", essentially combined into one song, closed the main set out strongly.

Although she played admirably and offered some levity between songs, it felt as if perhaps she was determined to play up to the church-y dignity of the Music Gallery.¹ Baby Dee projected a general sense of delicate insecurity throughout the set — of course, it's foolish to try and "read" such an expert performer so closely, and tempting to see too much of the persona that's being put into the songs. Coming back for an encore with a lighter touch, we were told, "I was nice all throughout the show, but now we're going to do a bad, nasty song". Launching into "The Earlie King", we got a quick sense of the other side of the coin, where the dirges give way to bawdiness and fairy-tale frightshows. That ended things on a lighter note. On the whole, a fairly transporting show.

Listen to a song from this set here.

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¹ "I think some of you might might have been here the last time I played in this place," Baby Dee told the crowd between songs. "I think I sang a song entitled 'You Must Not Pee in the House of God' [beat] 'Unless It's an Emergency'. And I'm not going to do that again."