An Evening with Katharine Whalen's Jazz Squad

219 South White Street,Wake Forest NC 27587

31 July, 2021

Description

You may have heard Katherine Whalen before. She's that singer with the neo-swing band (excuse me, hot jazz), the Squirrel Nut Zippers. You may have heard Katherine Whalen before. She's that singer with the neo-swing band (excuse me, hot jazz), the Squirrel Nut Zippers, who sounds eerily like Billie Holiday. For her debut as a leader, Jazz Squad, Whalen has continued to mine the music of yesteryear - mainly from the '20s and '30s. --- JAZZIZ Magazine Copyright © 2000, Milor Entertainment, Inc. -- From Jazziz Most known as a founding member of 1990’s band Squirrel Nut Zippers (with whom she sold over 3 Million records), Whalen’s work post-Zippers has ranged from her own take on jazz standards with “Katharine Whalen’s Jazz Squad” to the avant-pop of her “Dirty Little Secret” release. Whalen started writing the songs on “Madly Love” during her last couple of years with the Zippers and says that the songs, “manifest a very true voice for me”. It’s hard to categorize the music on “Madly Love”, but one could make the case that its blend of Irish blues and Southern-tinged rock falls under the rather broad definition of “Folk Music”. Whalen notes, “As I wrote these songs, I was accessing very early memories of the grown-ups playing records constantly around the house. Arlo Guthrie, The Everly Brothers, Mitch and Mickey, The Folks Men, and “The ‘New’ Main Street Singers were in heavy rotation, not to mention Sam The Sham & The Pharaohs!” The matriarch of Whalen’s family, her grandmother, was a gentleman farmer and an actress. She opened her farmhouse to summer stock actors each year, and threw lavish dinner parties. Her grandmother and her grandmother’s friends lived the lives they wanted to, and Whalen wanted to live them as well. At the age of eleven, Whalen began to wonder if she herself belonged to a different era, not the 1970’s but the 1930’s. She spent her teens rummaging through thrift store and flea markets for 45 records and vintage clothes. When she turned 20, her grandmother offered to buy her a farmhouse or pay for college tuition, and she chose the farmhouse, filling it with her collections. Under the tin roof of that farmhouse Whalen has sat with her tenor banjo and amended the tradition of Mother Goose. Songs like “Rose & Pine” and “Chief Thunder” tell shy, whimsical stories of thieves and battle horses. But they are as personal as they are mythic, as grounded in the present as they are inspired by the past – the past of early jazz and folk, Victorian literature, and Whalen’s own childhood. Whalen says, “On these songs, I’ve been able to tie in literary influences from Richard Brautigan to an antique set of my Children’s World Book Encyclopedias”. Whalen is a chronic passionate creator, and the common thread winding its way through her creations – be it music, building dollhouses, drafting posters, or writing her column on picnics for a local paper in her North Carolina hometown – is a general contagious exuberance. With “Madly Love”, she offers up a raucous (yet, at times bittersweet) collage of news-clipping from the pages of her life; swinging and swaying, our heroic belter throws open the barn doors, and we can’t help but join the party!