Claudia Schmidt Live At the Dakota
With the Dean Magraw Quintet
Pragmavision Publishing 2006
Review by Robert Downes - Northern Express, Traverse City, MI
No local singer matches the inventive dynamic of Claudia Schmidt, whose range runs from moodful musings to a roller coaster ride of scat rhymes and rhythms. As with many great jazz performers, Claudia’s energy is best captured live, and her latest disc finds her at her “state of the art” best.
While Schmidt is a familar face to many in Northern Michigan, with frequent shows throughout the year in the region, this CD reminds us that she has star power on the national scene. It was recorded live at the Dakota, a jazz club and restaurant in Minneapolis, where she established a large fan base years ago on tour and as a guest on “Prairie Home Companion.”
A pleasant surprise on this album is the inclusion of five songs more than seven minutes in length. Tunes like “Recordamè,” “Midnight Sun” and “Peace” unfold at a leisurely pace, allowing Schmidt’s vocals time to play off the jazz riffs of the Dean Magraw Quintet. The 10 songs on this album include a mix of Schmidt’s own work as a jazz and blues songwriter, with standards by the likes of Sergio Mendes, Lionel Hampton and Joe Henderson.
One minor suggestion: Claudia Schmidt has it in her to write jazz classics of her own. Much of the vocal jazz you hear today hangs on nostalgia, lingering dreadfully stale and reductive. It would be nice to hear Schmidt to write some new “standards” and leave the old stuff to lesser talents.
Bob Downes - Norhtern Express
May 10, 2007 www.northernexpress.com
I Thought About You
Year: 2001
Record Label: Independent Records Inc.
Style: Jazz Vocals
Musicians: Claudia Schmidt (vocals); Jeff Beavan (bass); Dave Ksycki (drums); Steve Little (guitar, vocal on trk 2); Dave Schock (trumpet, flugelhorn); Steve Stargardt (piano).
Hot on the heels of her first jazz CD, "Live At The Old Rectory Pub", Claudia Schmidt has released a "studio session" with her quintet. The singer has recorded eleven albums in various styles during her twenty-six years as a professional entertainer.
The choice of material is diverse and spans decades of standards and seldom heard pieces including Kurt Weill and Ira Gershwin's "My Ship" which was sung in the 1940's by Gertrude Lawrence. The writing of Howard Dietz and Arthur Schwartz is represented by their 1937 hit "By Myself." Claudia adds one of her own compositions in the form of "Love Is The Strongest Thing", a very bluesy ballad enhanced by the piano of Steve Stargardt and swingin' trumpet by Dave Schock. Schmidt's husky and powerful voice is well adapted to the blues style. Her up-tempo treatment of "How High The Moon" shows Claudia's ability to scat with the best of them.
This CD is a wonderful marriage of an exciting vocalist with a great quintet resulting in a very classy session. I really enjoyed the delicate delivery of "I Thought About You" in contrast with the hot and sassy groove on "Fever."
Claudia Schmidt and the Jumpboys certainly deserve your attention. DJ's should consider giving this CD a spin.
Reviewed by: Richard Bourcier
Wings of Wonder
Claudia Schmidt Spreads her...
"Wings of Wonder" by Robert Downes - The Northern Express - Traverse City, MI
She started her musical career some 25 years ago as a starry-eyed folk performer, dazzling audiences with earnest vocals, intriguing lyrics and even some oddball string instruments which married the sound of a piano with that of a guitar.
The stars are still there for Claudia Schmidt, but they're buried deeper within her music, and her new CD, Wings of Wonder, shows a depth and maturity which have mellowed the artist with age while losing none of her creative strength.
In short, it's a great album, bustling with a restless creativity which captures a woman's dreams in mid-life along with a dash of the spirit that gives Northern Michigan its flavor. This is Schmidt's fifth album on Red House Records, including It Looks Fine From Here, Essential Tension, Big Earful, and While We Live (with Sally Rogers).
Schmidt, who owns and operates The Old Rectory Restaurant on Beaver Island in the summer, is calling Traverse City home this season, and one can only hope she'll be performing locally.
Her album's title song is a Joni Mitchellesque ode to the spirit of freedom. We learn something of Schmidt's own spirit as the album progresses. 'Remember' tells us of a fork in the path that we walk very day. It offers two choices, be true or betray. Schmidt tells us "there is power in these stories we tell. / There is love in these secrets we tell."
Later, she confides the frustrations of owning a restaurant; specifically the yearning to check out 'Somebody Else's Restaurant': "I'd just like to eat at somebody else's restaurant. / Sometimes the very thing that's yours can't give you what you want. / I'd crave my menu almost anywhere, but when the place is yours, you can't go there."
This also has to rank as one of Schmidt's most romantic albums, as the songs 'Friday the Lovetheenth', and 'My One and Only Love' describe the joy of feelings which are so damned beautiful.
Beyond the lyrics, we get a purely visceral impression of Schmidt's soul on the haunting Brazilian song, 'Chamada' (The Call), an a cappella, wordless story about a siren of the forests who lures hunters to her with her beautiful singing, and then....
Schmidt performs on dulcimer and 12-string guitar on the album and is joined by Dean Magraw on 6 string guitars and e-bow, and by Peter Ostrouschko on mandolin and fiddle. Sometimes you get the sense that the instrumentals are wandering a tad more than might seem advisable, but then, that's string music for you, and the power of Schmidt's vocals have the gravity to return the songs to center.
A favorite tune is 'Stop to Rest', which seems to capture the essence of living in Northern Michigan. Besides nearly hitting a buck while driving, Schmidt notes that "these small towns scare me their whiskey smiles. / Too many cousins in too few miles / And big time towns terrify me, too, anything goes cause they don't know you. But we do know Claudia Schmidt, and on "Wings of Wonder" she proves herself once again to be a reliable source of inspiration.
Claudia Schmidt is contemporary folk music's front-line ambassador of wonder. For more than a quarter century, the Midwestern singer-songwriter-storyteller has inspired audiences to keep on the lookout for those easily unregistered details of everyday life -- the wisdom in a child's non sequitur, a fragment of your grandmother's writing, the humble glory of pie -- that can permanently alter one's perspective "in weird ways." Back in the day, Schmidt labeled those moments "wonder blowouts."
Once upon a time, Schmidt's Bay Area following -- including many transplants from the heartland who became addicted to her concerts after seeing her in Chicago, Ann Arbor, Madison or Minneapolis-St. Paul -- could count on their idol to deliver wonder blowouts every year right around Thanksgiving. But it's been nearly a decade since Schmidt last performed in the Bay Area. Hundreds of loyalists have been wondering where the self-described "creative noisemaker" has been hiding out.
No doubt Schmidt will share a few "hiatus" stories when she makes her long-awaited return to the Bay Area Saturday, March 15 at the Noe Valley Ministry in San Francisco. Some will likely turn on her experiences as an innkeeper and restaurateur on remote Beaver Island in Lake Michigan. That's where Schmidt and her husband, Bill Palladino, invested their time and energy for 11 years, running the Bluebird Bed & Breakfast and the Old Rectory Restaurant & Pub.
Schmidt didn't just shelve her musical career in the pantry, next to the peaches and tomatoes put up for the winter, however. She continued to write songs and perform around the area. And while it took her six years to return to recording after the 1994 release of It Looks Fine From Here, she did so generously. In 2000 she followed up a self-produced low-budget album of jazz standards, Live at the Old Rectory, with the acoustic folk-oriented disc Wings of Wonder on the respected Red House Records label.
The latter features nine original compositions plus stirring versions of the traditional "Wayfaring Stranger," Brazilian composer Milton Nascimento's "Chamada" and the classic "My One and Only Love," performed by Schmidt on soaring vocals and her trademark 12-string guitar and dulcimer, with Dean Magraw on guitar and Peter Ostroushko on mandolin and fiddle. Last year she released I Thought About You, a full-fledged jazz studio album with her band the Jump Boys (Independent Records), featuring brilliant renditions of "My Ship," "How High the Moon," "Fever," "Nature Boy" and other classics.
Concurrently, Schmidt made her first tentative return to the road, booking herself on a "reconnaissance" tour of the East Coast. "It was the first step in rebuilding the territory," Schmidt said last week from her mainland Michigan home in Traverse City, where she was just about to go out snowshoeing for relaxation. "And it's been hard. It's like having to go to the back of the line."
What Schmidt discovered was that the folk circuit has changed dramatically since she's been away. There are more musicians competing for gigs, established clubs are filling their calendars a year or two in advance and smaller venues are cutting back on what they present and how much they'll pay for it. "I would hate to be just starting out now," Schmidt muses.
But, in a way, she is. Once she was an icon on public radio's popular "A Prairie Home Companion," where host Garrison Keillor gave her the press-kit blurb of a lifetime with his glowing praise, "When Claudia sings a song, it stays sung." Now Schmidt says she's "almost afraid to call people" for bookings, depending on how "delicate" she's feeling on a given day. The responses to her queries vary from welcoming to dismissive. "I call one place, and I'm a legend," she says. "I call another, and it's, 'Yeah, yeah, send me something.'"
Then there are the promoters who are skeptical not only about Schmidt's drawing power after such a long absence but also, perhaps especially, the unabashed jazz turn she took on I Thought About You.
"I almost got myself kicked off the folk circuit for doing that," she says. "What a pain! Honest to God, people are so easily terrified." Although revered by many for the way she combines the vocal purity of Joni Mitchell with the wry observational humor of Lily Tomlin and dollops of philosophical poetry, Schmidt always made jazz a part of her musical blend. Her classic 1983 album Out of the Dark included a cover of Hoagy Carmichael's "Skylark" and the Ellington chestnut "I'm Beginning to See the Light." I recall a duet performance of "Baby, It's Cold Outside" with John Gorka at the Great American Music Hall in 1988. And Schmidt also added guest vocals to a pair of albums by jazz-fusion guitarist Steve Tibbetts.
"I've always mixed stuff in," Schmidt says, "but when I called the Seattle people this time around, they were like, 'Hey, oh, I don't know, we hear you're a jazz singer now.' I had to counsel them that I'd been doing this for 30 years, that they had to trust me to know my audience and that I wasn't going to show up in a sequin gown and sing bebop, although now I half want to."
"It's very humbling," Schmidt adds. "I wasn't aware that I needed any more [humility] after living on the island for 11 years." Despite all the sweat equity Schmidt and Palladino poured into the Bluebird and the Old Rectory, and the contributions they made to local culture, including the island's first wine list and some first-rate entertainment, the couple found themselves financially overextended. Schmidt continued to perform gigs on the mainland to supplement the minimal income generated by the B&B and restaurant. "At one point," she says, "we said, 'Well, maybe we have to get a fourth job to pay for the other three.'"
Schmidt, a kind of cosmic den mother by nature, loved the role of innkeeper. Guests often became friends for life. Of course, that could be problematic. "People would come back, and we wouldn't want to charge them," she says with a laughs. Ultimately, Schmidt notes, the business "became an albatross, which really makes me furious, because we did so much good s--- there, and we're getting kicked in the teeth for it."
If her psyche needs a little dental work, Schmidt's fans are poised to pick up the tab, and the singer has been deeply moved by audience reactions to her return. Even before setting out on her eight-show West Coast tour, her Seattle concert was sold out. And although she professes to hate the Internet, her Web site has proved to be an invaluable promotional tool. One fan in England recently ordered a copy of Schmidt's 1981 recording Midwestern Heart after doing a Web search for the chorus of a song he heard her sing at the Cambridge Folk Festival in 1979. Another fan, in Washington, wrote to Schmidt, explaining that he'd been enjoying a bootleg tape of her music for 20 years. "He figured it was about time he paid up," Schmidt says, "so he calculated what he would have paid for the album, plus some interest over the years, and he sent me a check for 42 bucks and something."
People never fail to amaze, but Schmidt finds plenty to astound her in a different way in the current political climate. "The fact that millions of people around the world are saying 'Let's not go to war' is really heartening to me," she says, "but then the president dismisses them as a focus group. That really put me over the top. That was bang-zoom-to-the-moon time."
But she vows not to be shocked and awed into submission. "It seems like the music these days, especially in the folk realm, functions more than ever as music therapy," she says, "because people are working so hard just to stay afloat and not go into a coma of depression, and they're getting so little tending on that level. I really like the music for that these days; it's music for the shell shocked. I'm really happy that I can do it still."
Fortunately, for those of us within Schmidt's sphere of influence, some wonders never cease.
