REVIEWS
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Gig REVIEW: Izzy Isgate, songwriter (accompanied by Paul Sparks)
live at Bedern Hall, May 29, 2016. (1/6/16)
By Jason Edwards
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The American poet Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick once described how becoming a person was much like a bird building a nest, in which one skilfully made a more or less permanent structure and sense of home, one's very self, from the rag tag of things that were either at hand, or were to be scavenged and gathered nearby.
Izzy's Isgate's first concert at Bedern Hall brought Sedgwick's idea to mind for me, as the audience was treated to an extraordinarily various bricolage of musical styles, instruments, and genres. Izzy's recent writing is part late music, in the company of Max Richter's 'Sleep' in terms of the way it employs repetitive forms and the language of variations to hold you within something both comfortingly familiar and endlessly various, and part autobiographical singer-songwriter, with a rousing encore from yet another genre that (until now) rare form: lesbian sailor folk music, that had the audience laughing, as earlier moments, and particularly the extraordinarily painful story of 'Hummingbird', had more than one person in my itself rather salty view, in tears.
Izzy is that very rare thing indeed: the British singer songwriter on a par with the American, and her new musical partnership with Paul Sparks has taken her music to a whole new level, the perfection of Sparks's filigree recalling nothing so much as the equally perfect embroidery provided by Don Peris around Karen Peris's music on recent work by the Innocence Mission. Meanwhile if it can be plucked or strummed, Izzy can master it, and both take pleasure in it, and bring pleasure from it, and we saw extraordinary things happen on the lute, guitar, mandolin, dulcimer, and hammered dulcimer. Eat while hot, and whilst you can still see Izzy in a venue as appropriate, intimate, and plain gorgeous as Bedern Hall. -- (originally posted on Skiddle Reviews)
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Jason Edwards is author of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (Routledge, 2008), & co-curator/editor of Sculpture Victorious: Art in an Age of Invention 1837-1901 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2014).
A Few Words... (2/6/16)
from composer & multi-instrumentalist John O' Neill
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I was lucky enough to attend a magical concert by Izzy Isgate and Paul Sparks at Bedern Hall, Sunday, May 29. Izzy’s music is beyond category, drawing on many different musical styles. She delivers her songs with a soulful voice, warm in the lower register and plaintive higher up, and accompanies herself on a variety of stringed instruments, including 12-string guitar, bass guitar, lute, ukulele, Appalachian dulcimer and hammered dulcimer, all of which she plays with an impressive natural facility. "Seascapes," "It’s Not Beautiful," and "Hummingbird" were particularly memorable examples of her unique compositional style. Paul Sparks accompanied her superbly on guitar, mandolin and lute, calmly negotiating some fiendishly difficult passages. The combination of these two wonderful musicians held the audience spellbound. Catch them on a recording or in concert, and then when they become famous you can say you were there when they started out.
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John O'Neill is author of the critically acclaimed bestselling "Jazz Method" series of instrumental methods for saxophone, Clarinet, & flute (published by Schott), & co-author of Jazz Method for Trumpet. As an established professional musician, John has composed music for dance, theatre, film & television; he studied under legendary jazz saxophonists Lee Konitz and Warne Marsh.
REVIEW published in York Calling Arts & Culture Magazine (3/6/16)
By Andrew Bogie
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Izzy Isgate’s askew folk originals find their natural home in Bedern Hall, former dining room to the vicars choral of York Minster, in whose shadow the restored relic stands. The singer-songwriter’s contemporary melodies of heartbreak and resolve swoop over her own glistening chords and Paul Spark’s plucked arpeggios, each song given time to swell, recede, and reverberate before a rapt audience in the last of the day’s sunlight.
The concert also provides the opportunity to hear the duo play – to use Isgate’s collective noun – a menagerie of stringed instruments, including lutes, dulcimers hammered and Appalachian, a Bulgarian tambura, and most bizarrely an electric bass guitar. The strings ring out with crystalline clarity, thanks both to the hall’s natural acoustics, and Lynette Quek’s sensitive sound engineering. Each instrument, all of which Isgate lovingly introduces as she would old friends, lends new colour to the songs, with the players clearly energised by the creative possibilities of such variance.
The epic ‘Hummingbird’, appearing close to the end of the evening’s second set, exemplifies Isgate’s new creativity; this paean to a lost guitar includes Sparks’ most ambitious playing, coaxing mimetic glissandos, trills and harmonics that call to mind the metaphorical bird and honour the beauty of the instruments themselves. ‘Running with Lone Wolves’, early in the setlist, showcases both Isgate’s gift for extended metaphor and her interest in exploring the textural possibilities of the many stringed instruments played throughout the evening, strumming, picking and tapping the tambura.
As with the best folk music, the meaning of each song stretches beyond the surface, yet each is so beguiling that it is a joy just to hear the playing and original composition. The songwriting is never swamped with self-seriousness; its levity is exemplified by the delightful instrumental that ends the first half, ‘Syncopated Suite 2. No Alarms & No Reprisals Please’ and the encore ‘Sea Shanty Shanti Shanti (Or, the Polyamorous Lesbian Sailor)’.
In the latter, Isgate delights in weaving contemporary gender politics with an accessible form and melody as old as time, while Sparks’ mandolin tremolos play up the pathos of the sea(wo)man’s tale. It’s another song that gathers ironic meaning in the setting; following its inhabitance by the (supposedly) celibate sacred choral, Bedern Hall stood in the centre of Victorian York’s slums and red light district. Afterwards we stumble into the gloaming, aglow.
Izzy Isgate’s live EP (accompanied by Paul Sparks), ‘Making Ground As We Go’, is out now. -- originally posted on review blog Bogie like Humphrey, edited version published on York Calling
Andrew Bogie writes about writing, films, music, comedy, & general arts & culture. Andrew also makes "ferociously indie shamblepop with Tomorrow Night's, has written a handful of essays on Bob Dylan, and is the proud possessor of a pass at Grade 6 piano."