Shelley Hirsch and Simon Ho celebrate the release of their CD, “Where Were You Then?” on Tzadik's Key Series Composed by Hirsch and Ho "Where Were You Then?" blends songs, story telling and rich atmospheric musical arrangements and represents a new chapter in their longstanding collaboration David Garland of WNYC called the cd "compelling and engrossing Ernie Paik in the Chattanooga Post wrote "It’s an album to be savored with complete attention and it’s like a love letter itself, enveloped in the naked truth” These concerts mark the world premiere of these arrangements.
CD – Release concerts with Shelley Hirsch & Simon Ho, joined by New Yorkʼs greatest instrumentalists, including Jason Kao Hwang - violin, Jessica Pavone -viola, Nicole Federici – violin,viola, Marika Hughes - cello, David Hofstra – bass, tuba, Danny Tunick – vibraphon, marimba, drums and Dafna Naphtali -vocals.
Special thanks to Roulette, Stadt & Kanton Bern and to John Zorn (Tzadik) and Harvestworks whose support helped make the CD possible.
Creative Capital
CD bestellen
Shelley Hirsch and Simon Ho
“Where Were You Then?”
(Tzadik)
In the emotionally draining piece “The Nursing Home,” on the new album “Where Were You Then?” by vocalist Shelley Hirsch and keyboardist Simon Ho, Hirsch recalls the passing of her mother and a key detail afterward—noticing a book of graphic Victorian-era erotic photography on the nightstand by her mother’s deathbed, full of love letters. It’s a perfect example of the kind of detail that makes the album a biting, compelling listen, with Hirsch revealing herself at her most vulnerable moments.
Throughout the album, this susceptibility is seemingly mirrored by recollections of nakedness—a Parisian nude art model friend, a skinny-dipping partner, her mother being changed by a nurse. Even a middle-aged love interest is afforded a vivid verbal portrait, detailing his spare-tire-physique, balding head and scar-speckled skin.
Intensely personal, it’s an album that subtly deals with the question, “Who can I trust?” by relating stories from online dating and betrayal to being blocks away from ground zero on 9/11 and hearing on the news a caller on the 86th floor saying, “The situation seems to be under control.” The entire album is not heavy and dark, with the title track in particular being a euphoric and exhilarating story about attending an outdoor party 40 years ago on psychedelic mushrooms.
Hirsch is on a short list of notable eccentric vocalists with unique, unconventional singing styles (others include Cathy Berberian and Patty Waters) and “Where Were You Then?” features a combination of spoken and sung parts, with Hirsch frequently adding playful and unusual flourishes and slipping seamlessly into various European accents. Her collaborator, the Swiss composer Simon Ho, offers tasteful string arrangements and synthetics to complement Hirsch’s stories, striking a good balance with gentle sonic stimulation. It’s an album to be savored with complete attention, and it’s like a love letter itself, enveloped in the naked truth, if the listener is willing to let her in.
“Where Were You Then?” Shelley Hirsch and Simon Ho
Personnel: Shelley Hirsch (vocals); Simon Ho (accordion, piano, organ, keyboards, sequencer); Karel Boeschoten, Misa Stefanovic (violin); Stephanie Griffith, Sibylla Leuenberger, Karri Koivukoski, Daniela Bertschinger (viola); David Gattiker, David Inniger, Kathrin Boegli, Tomas Ulrich (cello); Dave Hofstra (tuba); Tony Buck, Michael Suchorsky (drums, percussion); David Simons, Andi Hug (drums).
Time Out says
Thu Mar 22 2012
The songs and stories included on Where Were You Then?, a charming new collaborative album by Brooklyn vocal improviser Shelley Hirsch and Swiss keyboardist, composer and arranger Simon Ho, are packed with savory details of life lived in the moment and embraced in full—qualities that have always been palpable in Hirsch's brash yet subtly detailed art. Ho wraps his partner in plush strings and other savory details; during this two-evening engagement, you can hear it all come to life.
GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN
NIGHT LIFE, ROULETTE (New Yorker)
509 Atlantic Ave., Brooklyn (917-267-0363)—March 29 and March 31: The experimental vocalist, songwriter, and East New York native Shelley Hirsch celebrates the release of “Where Were You Then?,” a comic and moving new collection of story-based songs made with the Swiss composer and keyboardist Simon Ho, who joins her here. This enchanting record, like much of Hirsch’s work, delves deep into her personal biography. One of the most affecting songs tells of her hitchhiking through Germany in 1972 and then watching, with the German strangers who gave her a ride, the Olympics on television while members of the Israeli Olympic team were slain. Another standout is the title track, which describes Hirsch’s experience taking psychedelic mushrooms at a Napa Valley potluck in 1971. The duo will be backed up by a superb ensemble of New York musicians that includes Jason Kao Hwang on violin, Danny Tunick on vibraphone and percussion, and Marika Hughes on cello.
Shelley Hirsch & Simon Ho
Thursday, March 29, 2012 @ 8:00 pm
Over two nights, charismatic raconteur Shelley Hirsch and talented Swiss keyboardist/composer Simon Ho celebrate the release of their new CD, “Where Were You Then?”, on Tzadik’s Key Series. An extended work that blends SONGS, STORYTELLING, and RICH, ATMOSPHERIC SOUNDSCAPES, “Where Were You Then” represents a new chapter in a longstanding collaboration. With music co-written by Hirsch and Ho, plus Ho’s string arrangements, and Hirsch’s unpredictable, multi-layered storytelling, the songs evoke many contrasting moods at once.
“Where Were You Then? features a combination of spoken and sung parts, with Hirsch frequently adding playful and unusual flourishes and slipping seamlessly into various European accents. Her collaborator, the Swiss composer Simon Ho, offers tasteful string arrangements and synthetics to complement Hirsch’s stories, striking a good balance with gentle sonic stimulation. It’s an album to be savored with complete attention, and it’s like a love letter itself, enveloped in the naked truth” -Ernie Taik, Chattanooga Post
With a voice that SLIPS EFFORTLESSLY BETWEEN SPEECH, MELODY, AND PURE SOUND, Hirsch’s stories work perfectly with the dreamlike state and shifting moods of Ho’s musical arrangements. The stories are filled with surprises and curiosities, with HUMOR AND ODD TWISTS that can elicit SMILES, TEARS, JITTERS, AND WHIMSY, as each listener is likely to find their own meaning in the resonant stories. Early responses to the recording have called the music “PERSONAL ENOUGH TO MAKE IT RIVETING but without crossing the line into being too much information”, “VERY MOVING”, and “FILLED WITH VIVID IMAGERY”.
The concerts on March 29 and 31 feature LIVE PERFORMANCES OF MUSIC FROM THIS NEW RELEASE, with Ho and Hirsch joined by an amazing ensemble of New York’s greatest instrumentalists, including Jason Kao Hwang, Jessica Pavone, Karen Waltuch, Marika Hughes, David Hofstra, and Danny Tunick.
http://roulette.org/events/shelley-hirsch-simon-ho-2/
http://touchingextremes.wordpress.com/2012/04/15/shelley-hirsch-simon-ho-where-were-you-then/
SHELLEY HIRSCH / SIMON HO – Where Were You Then?
April 15, 2012
Massimo Ricci
Tzadik
“Dedicated To Shelley’s mother Fran, who could describe in the most vivid detail things that brought her pleasure (fried onion rings included!!!)”
Not only this quote from the liners lets us ascertain the genetic derivation of Shelley Hirsch’s endowment for narrative – I, for one, would spend days reading these meticulous accounts of existential shards, from apparently meaningless to hurting in the innermost – but it helps in establishing an important limit. We regularly forget about the border separating the love for our dears and the recognition of a reality that is often wholly different from what was hoped. In Where Were You Then?, Hirsch magically manages to slap the face with unforgiving truths masked as fairy tales of sorts. Not exactly with a happy ending, always replete with hundreds of barely noticeable particulars that, once joined, complete a sensational mosaic. A synthesis of adolescent adventure, violent scare, physical infatuation and sense of loss; a maturity that never thrusts childhood scents and uneasy recollections aside.
It takes a lot to pull wisdom out of such a weighty baggage through a mere record. Enter Swiss composer Simon Ho (short for Hostettler), a rather obscure and extremely talented keyboardist and arranger who, together with the more renowned partner, created sixteen delicious orchestral frames executed by musicians at the highest levels of competence (percussionist Tony Buck, bassist-cum-tuba Dave Hofstra and cellist Tomas Ulrich the “familiar” names amidst a grouping of less famous – but still fantastic – string players). Every episode of this CD is contextualized by stylistic connotations that highlight the dramatically engaging aspects of Hirsch’s recounting. The insistently shifting piano arpeggios accompanying the description of her mother’s declining health in the heartrending “The Nursing Home”. The washes of string drones ebbing and flowing under the text of “Earl And Me”, chronicle of two mature persons finally meeting after a fervid internet correspondence. The waltz typifying the opening “Kathy Ray”. The half-Mitteleuropean, half-extraterrestrial accents of “Julius”, for this writer the record’s top of gracefulness in describing the purest affection – that between a human and a dog – in a piece that will jeopardize self-imposed fortitudes in sympathetic receivers. Even the tracks gifted with a bizarre irony (“Baa Baa Black Sheep”) don’t succeed in diverting the attention from the inherent angst that informs the near entirety of this release, ideally symbolized by the memory of the Israeli athletes killed by Black September fanatics during 1972’s infamous massacre at Munich’s Olympic Games in a chapter titled “Hitchhiking/Heinz”.
Furthermore, Hirsch acknowledges a restricted group of peculiar characters – in some occasion, unsung heroes like Jim Gartenberg (a man who, in the middle of the terrorist attack at the World Trade Center, was trying to encourage live TV viewers while stuck on the 86th floor of a soon-to-crumble edifice). Throughout these stories – narrating everything from the variable effects of drugs on herself and friends to the curliness of an old woman’s pubic hair just instants before death – the vocalist epitomizes a unique role of medium: “individual experience” versus “sharing the facts of life”. How many times you’ve wished that someone understood a flux of intimate flashes that no word can express, yet a chord – or a song – perfectly conveys? With the help of a luminous compositional cohort, Shelley Hirsch has perhaps released her finest work to date, subverting roles in the meantime: at first accepting the audience as her own psychoanalyst, she ends extracting regret, affirmative smiles and utter admiration from the overwhelmed listener.
Shelley Hirsch and Simon Ho will perform “Where Were You Then?”
in a nine-person ensemble, at Roulette in Downtown Brooklyn on March 29 & 31.
By Robert Egert
Where were you then? Greenpoint vocalist Shelley Hirsch and Swiss keyboardist composer/arranger Simon Ho’s new CD is an evocative, nostalgic, and stylistic exploration of personal and cultural memory.
Hirsch was born in East New York, Brooklyn, and has been a seminal and influential presence in the new music and performance art scenes. Throughout her rich career Hirsch has been able to continually broaden and deepen her work musically and emotionally while still making every song sound like a revelation.
This album is a song cycle built from recordings and arrangements created collaboratively and individually over an extended period beginning in 2006. Together Shelley and Simon weave songs, spoken word, and instrumentals into a panorama that encompasses childhood, love, animals, travel, and death.
The first track, “I Love Glider Planes,” brings to life a distant memory from childhood. Arranged with a chamber sized string ensemble, it evokes not so much the day itself, as the impact of the day as seen through the romantic lens of nostalgia. Deeply personal, the song is kinesthetic and layered with inscrutable meaning in the way that only childhood memories can be. We can’t relive the experience with Shelley, but she can rekindle the magic of the day and the surprise and delight of being.
“Never Should I Have Seen You,” a bittersweet narrative ballad, is arguably the most accessible and inviting work. Its structure is that of an Edith Piaf ballad complete with
accordion accompaniment, but the syntax and the grammar is totally Yiddish. The familiar structure of the song plays the perfect straight man to Shelley’s slightly comic, slightly bizarre, but ultimately sincere channeling of Yiddish culture through her vocal style and personal experience.
“Julius,” a dark reminiscence of love in the shadows, brings to mind the music of Kurt Weil and the ambiance of exploring dark, empty streets. Whether Julius is really a street dog or just an extension of the old saying, men are dogs, is ultimately of no moment because the song is about love—sandpaper tongues, panting breath, and all.
Shelley’s style has always been polyglot in its influences but the result rises above its sources and emerges as a unique sound that is unlike any other, residing at the boundary between epiphany and emotional collapse. Part performance artist and part chanteuse, her appeal has as much to do with her emotional presence (and vulnerability) as with the formal structure of her pieces.
In this collection we can hear ancient Jewish chanting and Middle Eastern vocal modalities vie with pop and new music tropes. What keeps Shelley’s music coherent is her unique extended vocal style combined with her expressive narrative powers. Every song, no matter how abstract or literal, tells a story infused with emotion and personal truth.
While many of Hirsch’s narratives tell stories with a beginning, middle, and end, they don’t all function that way nor do they need to. Simon Ho’s crystalline arrangements and the songs’ formal clarity create their own logic. “Giselle (Carousels)” is the perfect pathway into this magical mysterious musical memory box. It brings to life the evocative sounds of a calliope and a verbal stream running a circular course in and around the moving horses.
More sobering, “The Nursing Home,” is your invitation to accompany Shelley on a visit to her mother in a nursing home. Structured like a chant, with echoes of the synagogue and Philip Glass minimalism, it is a path down a road that we don’t want to travel. On pieces like these, her music is perhaps closer to a form of poetry than song.
Shelley Hirsch will be performing selections from her new CD at the release party at Roulette on March 29 & 31, 8pm, 509 Atlantic Ave, Brooklyn. Call (917) 267-0363 for more information.
Shelley Hirsch and Simon Ho CD Release “Where Were You Then?” at Roulette
Cost: Payment required - 10.00
Brooklyn, NY: Over two nights, Shelley Hirsch and Simon Ho celebrate the release of their new CD,
“Where Were You Then?” on Tzadik’s Key Series.
Composed by Hirsch and Ho, “Where Were You Then?” blends songs, story telling and rich atmospheric soundscapes and represents a new chapter in their longstanding collaboration.
With a voice that slips effortlessly between speech melody and pure sound, Hirsch’s stories work perfectly with the dreamlike state and shifting moods of their music (with instrumental arrangements by Ho). The stories cover a wide territory, from hitch hiking in Germany in 1972, to living in a squat in Amsterdam, to a song about online dating and remembering the passing of a loved one. The multilayered stories are filled with vivid details, humor, tenderness, loss and many odd twists in which each listener is likely to find their own meaning.
David Garland of WNYC called the CD “compelling and engrossing”.
“It’s an album to be savored with complete attention and it’s like a love letter itself, enveloped in the naked truth”, wrote Ernie Paik in the Chattanooga Post
Kurt Gottschalk of WFMU Radio wrote “Gorgeous .. Shelley Hirsch is among the most honest of improvisers, direct and deeply in the moment. When she turns that candor and intimacy to composed works, as in her “O Little Town of East New York,” the results can be revelatory in the strictest sense of the word. With composer Simon Ho, Hirsch has created a work that follows in that vein, and one of her finest records to date.”
“Where Were You Then? is an evocative, nostalgic, and stylistic exploration of personal and cultural memory”, wrote Robert Egert in WG News and Arts.
For this world premiere presentation of music from the cd, Hirsch voice, Simon Ho keyboards are joined by New York’s greatest instrumentalists, including Jason Kao Hwang, Jessica Pavone, Nicole Federici, Marika Hughes, David Hofstra, Danny Tunick and Dafna Naphtali.
The NY Times has called Hirsch “an extraordinary vocalist… enormously, inventive, scathingly satiric and virtuosic… A brilliant overwhelming presence on stage”
