Listen: Caroline Shaw, Attacca Quartet's Andrew Yee Perform on WNYC's "Dolly Parton's America" Podcast
Caroline Shaw and Attacca Quartet cellist Andrew Yee are on a special bonus episode of WNYC's Dolly Parton's America podcast hosted by Jad Abumrad. This episode features performances recorded live at Brooklyn's National Sawdust. "I got to thinking about all the songs that we sing about home, and as we leave home, we carry those songs with us. We morph them, transform them," Abumrad says. The performers "played traditional music that they connect to, that reminds them of home, that is from their home, but they all took that music and gave it a new spin." Shaw, accompanied by Yee, offers her take on the 18th-century hymn "On Jordan's Stormy Banks I Stand" and Alfred Brumley's 1929 song "I'll Fly Away." Hear it here.
Caroline Shaw and Attacca Quartet cellist Andrew Yee are on a special bonus episode of WNYC's Dolly Parton's America podcast hosted by Jad Abumrad released last week. The series explores why Parton and her music bring people of all stripes together in a divided world. This new episode, heard below, follows from an earlier episode—in which Abumrad connects Parton's Tennessee mountain home with his own father's childhood home in Lebanon and looks to a Rhiannon Giddens performance to find connections across cultures—and features performances recorded live at Brooklyn's National Sawdust in October hosted by Abumrad around the theme of "covering home."
"I got to thinking about all the songs that we sing about home, and as we leave home, we carry those songs with us. We morph them, transform them," Abumrad explains. The performers "played traditional music that they connect to, that reminds them of home, that is from their home, but they all took that music and gave it a new spin."
Shaw, who hails from Greenville, North Carolina, is accompanied by Yee to close out the episode with her take on two songs: the 18th-century English hymn "On Jordan's Stormy Banks I Stand" and Alfred Brumley's 1929 song "I'll Fly Away." You can hear both starting at about twenty-two minutes in here:
Caroline Shaw and Attacca Quartet have each earned Grammy Award nominations for their album Orange, released on New Amsterdam and Nonesuch Records earlier this year: Shaw for Best Contemporary Classical Composition and the Attacca for Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance. "A love letter to the string quartet," says NPR. "[W]hen you hear all the imaginative sounds on Orange, you know you're listening to the voice of a strong composer." To pick up a copy, head to iTunes, Amazon, and the Nonesuch Store, where CD orders include a download of the complete album at checkout. The album can also be heard on Spotify and Apple Music.
Shaw performs with Gabriel Kahane in two concerts at Heritage Hall in Vancouver on December 11 and 12. She joins her vocal ensemble Roomful of Teeth for two nights of holiday music at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City on December 15 and 16. Attacca Quartet performs music from Orange at Miller Theatre in New York on February 6, and Shaw, Attacca, and Kahane are in concert at The Phillips Collection in Washington, DC, on May 3. For details, visit nonesuch.com/on-tour.
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