When one looks at Kamilah Marshall’s CV, it belies a very hard working, almost ubiquitous performer and must wonder how she is not yet a certified household name. She has collaborated with some of the top producers in the industry, including Salaam Remi (Amy Winehouse, Jasmine Sullivan) and Nile Rodgers (Madonna, David Bowie) and enjoyed appearances on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno, Late Night with David Letterman, The View, and Oprah.
Since 2003, Kamilah has been one of the Staggering Harlettes, singing backup for Bette Midler, recently closing in The Showgirl Must Go On at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas performed on Broadway in RENT, Hairspray and Disney’s The Lion King, and then moonlit around her native Los Angeles at venues like Molly Malones and the House of Blues on the Sunset Strip.
The recent release of the soundtrack for Sex and the City 2, finds Kamilah singing an old standard “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered,” and she is featured on The Original Cast Recording of the Broadway musical, Hairspray and the soundtrack for the film, Hairspray, The Musical.
But beyond all of these accolades, we chose Kamilah Marshall in our blind taste test for the coveted MusicZeitgeist.com Indie Artist of the Month profile for July 2010 because we loved the funky, soulful and altogether unique sound of her recordings. That is ultimately the most important testament to her talent – the ability to deliver the goods to back up the press kit.
Here is a point and shoot Q&A with this refreshing indie artist:
WHO: Kamilah( ka.mee.la) Marshall
WHAT: Debut CD, GYPSY MOONSHINE . A fusion of Country/Blues/Funk. I call it FUNKABILY , a phrased coined by Nashville singer/songwriter Joanna Cotten.
HOW: I fell in love with Country music at an early age. When I started to make this record I found that I had a lot more than just country music in me. It became a beautiful fusion of everything I love about music in general.
WHY: Because what’s more fun than a black girl singin’ FUNKABILLY.
WHEN: Come July 9th you can get my CD everywhere possible. iTunes, CDBaby, amazon etc
WHERE: I’m in LA but hopefully in the fall I will be coming to a city near YOU!
VILLAGERS KICK OFF A BRIEF SIX- DATE U.S. TOUR JUNE 16 AT BROOKLYN’S KNITTING FACTORY
“What are you doing in Birmingham then?”
This inquiry — proffered with a certain amount of menace by a hard-accented, daunting piece of beef who likely makes a living as a heavy in Guy Ritchie flicks — is a fair question.
What exactly was I doing installed in a casino, just shy of five AM, in Birmingham, England?
Video of Conor J O’Brien sans band on Later with Jools Holland
Blinking my bloodshot eyes against the unkind light, I focus them across the room, where my faithful, if alcoholic-and-gambling-addicted meerkat, Thomás, was valiantly failing away whatever little money we had left to a tableful of Texas Hold’em clichés. It was all a little 2006 for me, but as a friendly prostitute told me earlier that evening, the only things Birmingham was good for were “rain, shopping and my pussy – none of which you can afford.” Given that state of affairs, casino living seemed an acceptable second prize.
I briefly consider telling my ham-fisted friend the actuality of my circumstances, which involve a whirlwind intercontinental trip in search of European financing with which to complete my passion project, Hardcastle and McCormick: The Movie*, which had suddenly and quite painfully taken residence in turnaround limbo back home. But in mentally recounting that misadventure, which cumulated with me snorting obscene amounts of vitamin B for an “agent” in an attempt to prove I could fake a line in order to get a part in an independent, low-budget film about a pizza boy and a lonely cougar housewife – which was a maximized effort to earn some money for the return trip to the United States of Goldman Sachs — I was suddenly blessed with the clarity to see that there was nothing to be gained here by telling the truth. Except maybe a beating.
“Got an aunt that lives here,” I mutter to the likely pugilist, noting the way the stitching of his shirt was straining against the bulk of flesh underneath.
He studies me the way a lion must while considering whether or not to disembowel a gazelle, then grunts in affirmation, improbably turning his attention back to the television above the gaming tables.
I feel like this is the second piece of luck I’ve had since landing on British soil. Just a few hours before, while scanning Birmingham’s weekly rag, I discovered that the cast of the hit Fox network TV series Glee was in town for a promotional performance at a place called Club Villagers, no doubt to muster foreign support for a franchise expansion a la The Office in reverse. So my current plan called for waiting out the rain by lightly gambling in the casino for the next 12 hours or so until it was time to go over to the venue and fake my way into the event by brandishing my dubious online press credentials. Certainly, being the only American journalist covering the overseas event would allow me to get some interview access with the cast of the show – especially with that dreamy Chris Colfer — which I planned to then parlay into a lead story on the holiest of holy hard news sites – E! Online – and earn some sorely needed cash for our plane ride home.
But watching as Thomás slides a majority slice of our diminishing pile of chips across the table after another losing hand, I’m starting to think a wet cardboard box on the street would have been cheaper for us than Plan A.
In point of fact, the next 12 hours pass uneventfully, with Thomás eventually battling his way back from the depths of debt to emerge the equivalent of $15 richer than when he started the night. By my calculations, between his winnings and the amount of comp drinks we’ve consumed, we emerge from the casino, right on schedule, in the neighborhood of $783 ahead the game.
Imagine my disdain then, to arrive at the show and learn that the cast of Glee was not in fact on tour and performing on a Tuesday night in Birmingham, England – but rather that the venue was called Glee Club and some Irish act named Villagers was playing instead.
It seemed a serious misinterpretation of the ad I had read some 19 hours earlier – perhaps due to all the vitamin B I had snorted – had led us astray. Far, far astray.
So long E! Online. Hello, Music Zeitgeist.
Glee Club was, at least on this night, set up for optimal performance reverence with a seated configuration, rather than the usual mess of bodies in a pile of general admission regret which birth most Music Zeitgeist reviews. The chairs could possibly have been an effort to camouflage weak ticket sales, but as one of them was available on the aisle fairly close to the stage, who was I to complain? If all else failed, once the lights went down, the venue’s seated arrangement would allow for two – hell, maybe even three – hours of sheltered sleep in near darkness.
No such luck.
No, our luck was much, much better.
From the time Villagers took the stage, a beautiful chaos reigned at Glee Club, to the degree that sleep was not possible – nor wanted.
For in Birmingham, just one week after the release of their debut full-length album, Becoming A Jackal, Villagers set about decimating their Glee Club audience with a barely controlled miasmatic deluge of dense, dark, 60’s-folk-influenced pop deliverance.
Fans of Jeff and Tim Buckley, The National, Damien Rice, Ours, Van Morrison, Tindersticks, Leonard Cohen, early Shannon Wright, Simon And Garfunkel, Radiohead and even Jens Lekman would do well to take note of Villagers as they begin their limited, six-date U.S. Tour June 16 at the Knitting Factory in Brooklyn.
Though Villagers is effectively a nom de plume for frontman Conor J O’Brien’s solo indulgences, it would only be through the success of ignorance to refer to Villagers in a live setting as anything less than a full band effort. O’Brien himself is impressive enough, but it’s the live addition of drums, keys, bass, lead guitar and backing vocals which render Villagers a force to be reckoned with (even though my high school English teacher told me not to end sentences with prepositions).
Kicking things off with “The Meaning Of The Ritual,” O’Brien quietly strummed his tiny guitar and offered confessionally: “My love is selfish / and I bet that yours is too,” conjuring a beaten veteran fresh off the frontlines of Love, on leave to sagely offer advice to all us FNGs. But unlike the album version of “Ritual,” which builds slowly only to check out after three minutes, just when you think something might happen, the song on this night went from hymnal to apocalyptic, swelling into a wall of sound that would make Phil Spector want to kill (again). It certainly wasn’t the last time the set would see such a turn of events; a number of Becoming A Jackal’s songs were similarly ignited over the course of the evening with a pyromaniac’s delight.
In fact, the next three songs (“Home,” “Becoming A Jackal” and “That Day”) were equally played as if they were set-enders, undoubtedly leaving a number of audience members wondering how the show would end if this was how it was starting.
All of which was nothing compared to what Villagers had in store for us next.
“Pieces,” which is bound to become mix-tape fodder for the Twilight set, followed, and for a moment, it seemed as if the crowd might get a sonic reprieve. “Pieces” started off meekly enough, with a spread of 60’s string-and-piano schmaltz a la “Theme From A Summer Place,” while O’Brien weakly croaked out his vocal accompaniment: “For a long, long time / I’ve been in pieces.” Just a few moments later, the whole she-bang jumped the rails and erupted like Eyjafjallajökull all over again. It appeared that Villagers’ intent was to bring the building down upon themselves and the crowd alike with their offering, and in fact, around the time the song’s coda rolled around, I was nervously eyeing the emergency exit signs in case a quick escape was necessary. At that point, the only thing clarion in the seismic mess that emanated from the stage was O’Brien’s werewolf howling, still hair-raisingly audible over the shuddering of Glee Club’s foundation.
It Takes A Village...to create the carnage Villagers delivered at Glee Club June 1st (crime scene photo by author).
At that point, given that everyone in the room had broken a sweat, Villagers took things down several notches with the tender album-closer “To Be Counted Among Men” and the fun, folky frolic of “The Pact (I’ll Be Your Fever).” Showing they had yet another gear in their arsenal (or perhaps it was a bottle of NOS in their trunk), O’Brien took up residence behind the piano so Villagers could whip out Becoming A Jackal’s opener — the hypnotic-if-ghastly Grimm’s fairy tale-esque “I Saw The Dead.”
Wrapping up the main set, they took on “Down, Under The Sea,” off 2009’s The Hollow Kind EP, before ending things with a churning “Ship Of Promises.”
Unfortunately, the usual “hey maybe we’ll come back and play a few more songs” jerk-off followed, but on this occasion at least, the audience was demanding it, even if it was in their own “we’re seated but we will clap ardently if reservedly in appreciation for the fact that our minds have just been riven asunder by your musical stylings.”
“Set The Tigers Free” led off after the break, providing somewhat of a breather with its mellow Marty Balin’s “Hearts” by-way-of-Tindersticks vibe. Finally on its last legs, the set closed as Villagers played their 2009 debut single, “On A Sunlit Stage,” which is inexplicably unavailable on either their EP or full-length release. Of course, it wouldn’t have been Villagers if they played it straight; true to form that night, the song crescendo’d into a sonic tidal wave, which abruptly stopped, leaving a vast silence in the room before more ardent-if-reserved clapping began anew.
Though Becoming a Jackal is not yet a month old, it’s hard not to wonder what Villagers will do next, since their live set was significantly extra-dimensional compared to the album versions of the songs they performed. That’s not to take anything away from O’Brien, who wrote all the material on the record, played almost all the instruments and produced it to boot. But the fact is that having experienced Villagers live makes it tough to listen to BAJ knowing those ass-kicking incendiary devices and chorale singing elements present in the live set aren’t forthcoming.
For his part, O’Brien makes quite the compelling performer, his looks belying the furor he ably and suddenly wielded regularly throughout the set. He resembles the twee progeny of Elijah Wood and that other Conor – Oberst – rendered even more harmless-looking by his diminutive guitar, all of which provides him with the theatrical leverage to come off as an unexpected wolf in sheep’s clothing. Possessing a flair for the dramatic, he’d oftentimes scan the audience down his nose and out of the corner of his eye, offering something of an invitation or condemnation, depending on which of his words were fleeing his mouth as his eyes happened upon his victims. When things would really heat up, O’Brien would often stray from the mic and repeatedly murmur lyrics to himself with his eyes closed, as if under a spell.
Still, it appears he’s far from taking himself seriously, and further still from fitting any tortured artist stereotypes that might follow him around, given the nature of his music (with his dark and literary lyrics, O’Brien has much more in common with James Joyce than his weepy singer-songwriter contemporaries). In fact, he would affably, even goofily, address the crowd between songs in the set, noting on more than one occasion, for example, how the audience was “freaking [Villagers] out” for being polite and tame compared to the normal raucousness of their affairs.
But nice guy or not, one thing is for certain. O’Brien and his Villagers ravaged the audience at Glee Club on June 1st, and picked their bones clean.
Iranian musical virtuoso Mohsen Namjoo is set to play the gorgeous Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles’ in a special concert engagement, ‘Namjoo in A Minor’. The event will take place on June 20, 2010. Namjoo will be accompanied by classical percussionist Pezhham Akhavas and piano virtuoso Tara Kamangar in addition to a full backing band.
Nicknamed the “Bob Dylan of Iran” by The New York Times, though perhaps not due to the sound but the candid poetic nature of his lyrics, Mohsen is credited for single-handedly revolutionizing the Persian music scene with a daring artistic fusion that transcends national boundaries. To our ears his output is more akin to Captain Beefheart, David Byrne or the Black Heart Procession. Drawing from Iranian folk music traditions, while incorporating elements of Western rock and blues, Namjoo adds his own clever lyrical wordplay and Neo-Classical poetry verses borrowed from the works of Rumi, Hafez, or Saadi. This unconventional, sophisticated approach has won over younger generations of music listeners.
Mohsen’s contemporary and controversial work has increasingly generated interest on the international stage. On September 11th, 2009 Namjoo was the only musical performance during the Venice International Film Festival. On October 8th, 2009 Namjoo made a surprise performance at the world famous Sala Verdi of the Milan Conservatorium in Italy. In December 2009, he gave his premiere live television on the Persian News Network of Voice of America in Washington DC. His music was featured in the indie film festival documentary, ‘Sounds of Silence’, as well as the feature narrative film ‘Few Kilograms of Dates for the Funeral’.
When he was seven-years-old, takashi Kamide lost his left foot shorty after having been diagnosed with cancer. By seventeen he had conquered the disease.
Not long after, another illness befell him for which there is no known medical treatment and by all appearances was terminal; he couldn’t eat anything, and lost weight from half of his body. It was another arduous journey to recovery, but as the artist states, what saved him was simply saying “LOVE”.
At that stage in his life, he was angry at everything and everyone, but his mother, father and many friends rallied for him, and never stopped believing he would fully recover, praying for him all the while he was fighting these illnesses. When at last it seemed he had beaten the disease forever, his doctor proclaimed it miraculous.
Now, takashi KAMIDE believes there are many miracles all over the world, and they can be realized readily, when you realize the potency of love.
But there is a parallel story that took place for KAMIDE: that of music. At six years of age, he was diligently practicing classical piano until discovering Bill Evans and Keith Jarrett which eventually led him to switch to jazz piano and subsequently an interest in the accordion. Working from a humble studio in his native Japan, he creates minimalist original masterpieces that evoke everything from Yann Tiersen or Penguin Cafe Orchestra to lost takes from Vangelis’ score from Blade Runner.
Music Zeitgeist chose the artist known as KAMIDE as the June 2010 Indie Artist of the Month, fresh from his debut showcase at Austin’s South By Southwest Music Conference. We had the opportunity to interview him and here is what we got:
Music Zeitgeist: Where in the world are you based?
I live in Japan, in the very beautiful city of Nara near Kyoto.
MZ: What inspired you to take up the accordion?
Because I practiced piano every day when I was young, when I picked up the accordion it felt like it could be a hobby. But when I heard Richard Galliano and Stegan Hussong playing an accordion, I realized it was not just a hobby, but that it had many other possibilities.
In fact, I am not using a standard accordion, but instead something called a “free base system.”
(The old accordion is from the 40′s or 50′s and the buttons are shell, not plastic, that’s why I love it.)
MZ: Listening to your music evokes so many genres, moods and eras not typically associated with traditional accordion music. Who are other influences?
As I mentioned I started really to play the accordion after listening to Richard Galliano and Stefan Hussong, but it was Keith Jarrett that inspired me the most. He plays so many styles of music that he seems like different people, but the emotion he invests is always of the same depth. His music goes into the center of his emotion and then he channels that out to move his audiences. I wanted to attain that same effect, that sound, using the accordion.
MZ: Talk about where and how you go about recording your music?
I recorded all the albums in my private studio using a very old Mac that is about fifteen years old. [smiles] Ironically I use my new Mac book for the internet.
MZ: You played the SXSW festival in Austin in 2010, tell us about your showcase
That was the first time I had ever been to SXSW. It was a fantastic experience for me. I didn’t really have a lot of time to prepare for my show. If I have a chance to do it again I will be more organized for that festival.
MZ: Where will you playing live next?
I play a small cafe in Japan every month. But my larger plans include the release of a new album on September 22nd of this year, and another October 27th. One of them consists of classical solo accordion music the other not only accordion but also piano and many other instruments. All of the material consists of my original compositions.
Discography and Release Dates
“Solo Solo Accordion” – Release Date: Nov 11, 2009
“My Grandfathers Clock” (EP) – Release Date: Feb 18, 2009
“KAMIDE” – Release Date: Mar 19, 2008
Lee DeWyze is the expressionless Chicago born and raised singer who won the 2010 show American Idol with a breathy, raspy voice and some fairly decent tones to boot. But the kid can’t seem to stay in tune – even on “Princess” the single from his aptly named album “Slumberland.” Is this it? This is the big opening to the Lee DeWyze canon? Some half-baked capital I indie semi lo-fi drum machine chorus-less attempt at songwriting?
Honest to God, it is nothing personal. I am sure the dude is mellow, and polite, and loves his parents. But that has nothing to do with anything. If this song is the best that America can squeeze out of its uncharted denizens, then it is just another fat black line under why MZ is here – to expose the true unseen talents to those who still care to discriminate between an experience and abject mediocrity.
That’s all. Again, Lee, nothing personal, and may you have a happy and healthy life. But your single is crap. Dig deep man.
Iranian musical virtuoso Mohsen Namjoo is set to play the gorgeous Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles’ in a special concert engagement, ‘Namjoo in A Minor’. The event will take place on June 20, 2010. Namjoo will be accompanied by classical percussionist Pezhham Akhavas and piano virtuoso Tara Kamangar in addition to a full backing band.
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