1 SJ J Picture Blue Heron Suite by Kaitlin Raitz copy.png

with support from JEFFREY FOUCAULT

SARAH JAROSZ

With her captivating voice and richly detailed songwriting, Sarah Jarosz has emerged as one of the most compelling musicians of her generation. A four-time Grammy Award-winner at the age of 29, the Texas native started singing as a young girl and became an accomplished multi-instrumentalist by her early teens. After releasing her full-length debut Song Up in Her Head at 18-years-old, she went on to deliver such critically lauded albums as Follow Me Down, Build Me Up From Bones, and 2016’s Undercurrent, in addition to joining forces with Sara Watkins and Aoife O’Donovan to form the acclaimed Grammy-winning folk trio I’m With Her.

Following up her most recent Grammy-winning album, World On The Ground, Jarosz has announced the release of Blue Heron Suite, a much-anticipated song cycle which she composed after being the recipient of the FreshGrass Composition Commission. Jarosz premiered the piece at the 2017 FreshGrass Festival at Mass MoCa in North Adams, MA. The commission proved to be an exciting musical challenge for Jarosz, and she ended up with a song cycle inspired by the frequent trips she and her parents made to Port Aransas, a small town on the Gulf Coast of Texas, a few hours from her hometown of Wimberley. 2017 had proven to be an emotional year for Jarosz — her mother had been diagnosed with breast cancer and the town of Port Aransas was severely impacted by Hurricane Harvey. Those two events caused Jarosz to think back to the early morning walks she and her mom would take along Mustang Island beach, and the Great Blue Herons they observed along the shore. The birds came to be a symbol of hope for her family during a difficult time, and they continue to remind her of family and home.

Thankfully, her mom is now in remission and Port Aransas is on the mend, but for Jarosz, Blue Heron Suite still encapsulates many of the feelings associated with that time and “serves as a quiet acknowledgment of life’s many uncertainties… and that you can always work to try to face the highs and lows with grace and strength.” Blue Heron Suite was recorded December 17-21, 2018 at Reservoir Studios in New York City. Jarosz is joined by Jeff Picker on bass and Jefferson Hamer on guitar and harmony vocals.

JEFFREY FOUCAULT

BLOOD BROTHERS, the much-anticipated follow-up to Jeffrey Foucault’s critically acclaimed 2015 album Salt As Wolves (“Immaculately tailored… Sometimes his songs run right up to the edge of the grandiose and hold still, and that’s when he’s best… Close to perfection” – New York Times; “Pure Songwriter, simple and powerful” – Morning Edition, NPR) is a collection of reveries, interlacing memory with the present tense to examine the indelible connections of love across time and distance. The poet Wallace Stevens wrote that technique is the proof of seriousness, and from the first suspended chord of ‘Dishes’ – a waltzing hymn to the quotidian details of life, which are life itself (‘Do the dishes / With the windows open’) – Foucault deftly cuts the template for the album as a whole, showing his mastery of technique as he unwinds a deeply patient collection of songs at the borderlands of memory and desire.

In two decades on the road Jeffrey Foucault has become one of the most distinctive voices in American music, refining a sound instantly recognizable for its simplicity and emotional power, a decidedly Midwestern amalgam of blues, country, rock’n’roll, and folk. He’s built a brick-and-mortar international touring career on multiple studio albums, countless miles, and general critical acclaim, being lauded for “Stark, literate songs that are as wide open as the landscape of his native Midwest” (The New Yorker), and described as “Quietly brilliant” (The Irish Times), while catching the ear of everyone from Van Dyke Parks to Greil Marcus, to Don Henley, who regularly covers Foucault in his live set. BLOOD BROTHERS is the sixth collection of original songs in a career remarkable for an unrelenting dedication to craft, and independence from trend.

Cut live to tape in three days at Pachyderm Studios in rural Minnesota, BLOOD BROTHERS reconvenes Salt As Wolves’ all-star ensemble: Billy Conway on drums, Bo Ramsey (Lucinda Williams) on electric guitars, and Jeremy Moses Curtis (Booker T) on bass, joined this time out by pedal steel great Eric Heywood (Pretenders) to unite in the studio both iterations of the band with which Foucault has toured and recorded for over a decade. Charting a vision of American music without cheap imitation or self-conscious irony, the ensemble deploys an instinctive restraint and use of negative space, an economy of phrase and raw simplicity that complement perfectly Foucault’s elegant lines and weather-beaten drawl.

As noise and politics, fashion and illusion obtrude on all fronts, BLOOD BROTHERS takes a deep breath and a step inward, with tenderness and human concern, paying constant attention to the places where the mundane and the holy merge like water. In language pared to element, backed by his world-class band, Foucault considers the nature of love and time in ten songs free of ornament, staking out and enlarging the ground he’s been working diligently all the new century: quietly building a deep, resonant catalogue of songs about about love, memory, God, desire, wilderness, and loss.