jody

blackwell

BIO

I grew up in South Carolina in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, in a house surrounded by large oak trees and filled with music, live and recorded, which growing up gave me a conviction that the world was a sturdy, melodious place that would always make me sneeze. My earliest music influences were the R&B tunes from my brother's glorious stash of 45's - Bill Withers, The Brothers Johnson, Stevie Wonder. A few years later I discovered folk and bossanova from my parents' dog-eared record collection, playing their Joni Mitchell and Astrud Gilberto vinyl until we had to buy replacement copies.

For me, music has always gone hand-in-hand with dancing. In high school while formally studying dance, I started playing guitar as a way to decompress after long rehearsals. Worried that a I'd just end up a barista in a coffee joint if I tried to pursue a career in dance, I opted for a more financially secure future and majored in Latin in college. At that time my alma mater Brown was enjoying a lively singer-songwriter scene (Mary Chapin-Carpenter, Lisa Loeb, Catie Curtis), so with added inspiration in my headphones from Joni and Jobim, I began experimenting with alternate tunings on the guitar and formed my first band with three college friends, playing clubs in and around Providence.

After graduation I headed to the folk music epicenter of the eastern seaboard, Cambridge MA, immediately landing work as a barista in a coffee joint. I also began playing in the subways and coffeehouses around Cambridge, including the venerable folk mecca Club Passim, and recorded my first solo acoustic CD Volcano in 1996 - six songs written in six different tunings which proved impossible to play all together at shows. A couple of years later I teamed up with members of the Boston-based rock band Groovasaurus to record and independently release my second album, Living Room Dances in 1999, a fusion of folk and jazz and a snapshot of my experiments with alternate tunings.

Whereas the songs of Living Room Dances have the feel of composed poems set to music, my third album Good Again, released in 2005, is a set of living conversations with people and events that have deeply impacted my life after 9/11, especially from my experiences teaching refugees newly arrived in Boston from war-torn countries all over the globe. With the tunes on Good Again I also started moving away from my acoustic folk roots towards a jazz/R&B influenced sound, having the good fortune to collaborate with some of the best rock and jazz players in the Boston music scene.

In 2010 I traded in my acoustic Guild for an electric Ibanez, began exploring the Blues, and with my fourth record Come and Gone, a retro-inspired journey through songs of nostalgia, change and letting go, I traveled further backwards to the spirit of the R&B 45's I danced to as a kid under oak trees.

My latest album Wilderness, released in 2016, again invokes the R&B vibe in a groove-oriented return to the era of tube amplifiers, soulful harmonies, and smoke-filled dance clubs. I guess it's the music most deeply rooted in my body, memory and soul. Comfort food for uncertain times and places far from home.

You can see us next at:

We are on hiatus this season during COVID-19, but we’re excited to soon be back in the studio working on pre-production for a new EP to be released in 2021, so check this space!

Stay safe and well folks!

 







photo: Karen Hendrickson-Santospago