SOUNDTRACK: KAIA KATER-Tiny Desk Concert #832 (March 13, 2019).
This Tiny Desk Concert was posted under a different category than the others and so does not appear on the Tiny Desk page (yet). In order to find it you need this link.
The expectation upon seeing a banjo hanging is one of rollicking rowdiness, but when Kaia Kater began to strum her five-string, the mood in the office turned plaintive and a bit mournful. The Afro-Caribbean-Canadian singer and songwriter, who studied Appalachian music at West Virginia’s Davis & Elkins College, often references the Black Lives Matter movement, within a music form that doesn’t exactly snap to mind as being in dialogue with modern issues.
“Nine Pin” is, indeed, a slow, plaintive song with great lyrics. After a couple of verses, the band (it wasn’t obvious she had one) adds some very sparse accompaniment–low upright bass notes, gentle guitar chords and brushed drums.
These days, Kaia Kater records for Smithsonian Folkways, and some of the songs she brought to the Tiny Desk come from her recent recording Grenades, a record she worked on while exploring her father’s home country of Grenada.
The song feels old, except for the lyrics.
These clothes you gave me don’t fit right
The belt is loose and the noose is tight
and I love the chorus which seems like it should be sung quickly but in the way she sings it it’s meaningful
I’ll be your nine pin, eight ball, seventh day, six pound, diamond quarter girl
Before she gets to “Canyonland” she introduces her band: Andrew Ryan: bass; Brad Kilpatrick: drums; Daniel Rougeau: electric guitar, lap steel guitar.
She says this is from her new album and begins a much faster, but still quiet, banjo picking. The bowed bass adds a new kind of tension. The lap steel guitar brings a different kind of tension, especially when the song speeds up for the second half of the song. This song is compelling in a different way.
I find it interesting that she seems to have a more Canadian delivery (based on the Canadian country/Americana that I know of) which I rather like.
Before the final song she speaks about Grenada and how it impacted the title of her album Grenades.
It’s a country that has “experienced a lot of political turmoil,” she says. “My father left when he was 16 years old and he came to Canada as a refugee, on his own. It’s a story I ran away from for a long time, where I didn’t want to reconcile with myself being this kind of hyphenated Canadian.”
For this final song she doesn’t play an instrument. She just sings (in a lovely torch song vocal). Without the banjo, the entire tone of the song is different. The guitars, bass and drums make this song far more jazzy than folkie. But it works well once again with those lyrics in which
Kaiatries to come to terms with that history “Rain heavy like carpet bombs, sweetgrass, and lemonade / Fold the memory into your arms and whisper it away.”
There’s much power in her understated style.
[READ: March 21, 2019] “Dandelion”
I rarely think much about how old an author is. For the most part it’s not relevant unless the story identifies intensely with someone of a certain age. So this story begins, in a surprisingly clumsy opening that you need to unpack:
That Henry James, when he got old, rewrote his early work was my excuse for revisiting , at ninety, a story I had written in my twenties.
Segal is 91 so this is not a far-fetched claim, although it is a bit odd to include within the story itself.
The original story (unnamed in this story, if it exists at all) is about a hike that she and her father took up a mountain. She had wished her mother had come too, but her mother had had a migraine. (more…)
I Just Read About That... 