SATURDAY 20th February 2010
Times : 8pm
Tickets : £10 adv / £12 on the door / £18 for a 2day pass
Kath Bloom
Kath is a folk, country, and avant-garde legend and has been making records since the late 70s.
This will be only the second time Kath has ever played in the UK the first being her three day residency at Café Oto in August 2008 shortly after we opened.
The daughter of world-renowned oboist Robert Bloom, Kath was born and raised in New Haven, Connecticut, where she trained as a cellist. However, Kath met avant-garde guitarist Loren Mazzacane Connors in 1976 and teamed up with him for a series of now highly sought-after recordings of traditional blues songs and Bloom's fragile, beautiful originals. Some records were released in editions of as few as fifty, most no more than 300 copies, until the duo released their swansong Moonlight in 1984.
After a period of child-rearing, family life and daily financial struggle, Kath began to return to the studio in the 1990s. These new songs, recorded in friends' lounge rooms or cut-rate studios, reveal a mother-of-three songwriter as accomplished and affecting as any of her more acclaimed colleagues such as Lucinda Williams, Gillian Welch or Hazel Dickens.
In the mid-nineties US director Richard Linklater stumbled across her music and used the song Come Here in Before Sunrise, but despite an initial flurry of interest, little came of the exposure. Kath's album Finally, released on Chapter Music in 2006, is the first record she has put out since 1984, aside from her own self-released CD-Rs and cassettes.
http://www.myspace.com/kathbloomchapter
The Fujii
“Fujii is the collective name for the duo of Kuichi Fujishima, aka 'Fuji', and Paul Shearsmith. Fuji is a Japanese slide guitar player and singer, while Paul is an English player of pocket trumpet, tuned gas main, baliphone and founding member of Echo City, the group that plays plastic tube instruments.
Fuji is a true folk musician, with his music deeply rooted in that of his heroes, Fred McDowell, Son House and Bukka White, but at the same time, consciously or not, in the folk music of his Japanese background. He sounds perfectly at home singing his Japanese lyrics to these pentatonic blues scales; something like a Japanese Rainer. Paul Shearsmith adds utterly modern pocket trumpet, blown and sucked pieces of metal and plastic tubing” - Mike Cooper
Mike Barnes, biographer of Captain Beefheart, said in the Wire: 'Questions of authenticity are redundant with music this faithful to the Delta blues spirit'
Charlie Gillet said, after the bands performance at the 2002 Thames Festival: 'their first song was a raucous country style blues that inspired me to exclaim that I had not heard such an intense blues performance since seeing Son House at the 100 Club in 1967.'
Andy Kershaw said 'this extraordinary thing....a blues slide player from Japan and a bloke from Kentish Town who blows down a gas main...It's an unlikely combination, but it works...'
http://www.myspace.com/thefujii
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