After a triumphant performance at OTO in the beginning of October playing the songs of Federico García Lorca with her husband Victor Herrero, we're pleased to welcome Josephine back to play a set at the OTO baby grand.

Hailing from Colorado, Josephine Foster began to sing publicly at age 15, singing operatic hymns in the services of a Rocky Mountain log cabin church. After studies in classical music she moved to Chicago, where she abandoned the idea of dedicating herself to opera and returned to her love of writing songs. Since then, Josephine has traveled around the world sharing her music. She is married to Spanish composer Victor Herrero.

"You might call Ms. Foster’s eerie warbling old-fashioned, except that is evokes a scrambled past that exists only in her own vision: mountain songs that never were, spaced-out hybrids that never will be." -Sanneh / THE NEW YORK TIMES

"Fosters vocal style draws on a clutch of contradictory modes. It combines a facility for expressive extremes comparable to Patty Waters with the precise comportment of folk singers like Karen Dalton and Shirley Collins, and the kind of fast vibrato most associated with the flapper style of early Tin Pan Alley. Fosters recorded work draws much of its unusual power from a dialectic that reconciles a feel informed by the experimental underground with a more mainstream tradition as transmitted by artists as disparate as Josephine Baker and the McGarrigles. As such, her music exists in the same kind of liminal space as anachronistic counter-cultural figures like Tiny Tim, The Incredible String Band and R Crumb’s Cheap Suit Serenaders." - D Keenan / THE WIRE




Mapsadaisical review of Josephine Foster & Victor Herrero Band at Cafe OTO