Kimaya Diggs & Wallace Field w/ special guest Erisy Watt

114 Race St.,Holyoke MA 01040

13 June, 2022

Description

Kimaya Diggs & Wallace Field w/ special guest Erisy Watt Presented by DSP Shows Ages 16+ Kimaya Diggs, Wallace Field Erisy Watt Kimaya Diggs & Wallace Field w/ special guest Erisy Watt at Race Street Live in Holyoke, MA For the safety of our artists, venue staff, and our community as a whole we are requiring proof of full vaccination against COVID-19 for admittance to all shows at Race Street Live until further notice. While mask-wearing is not required at this time, we still strongly encourage wearing a mask when not actively eating or drinking to protect yourself and others. Results from a negative COVID test will NOT be accepted for entry.Please bring your vaccination card, or a photo of it, along with a corresponding state or federal ID for entry.The CDC defines “full vaccination” as 2 weeks after the final dose of a COVID-19 vaccine.These policies are subject to change.General admission partially seated. Kimaya Diggs Kimaya Diggs is a musician and writer, born and based in the rolling hills of Western Massachusetts. The sounds of her childhood included Emily Dickinson, Ella Fitzgerald, Whitney Houston, 70’s soul, and songs around the table with her family. A fourth-generation artist, Kimaya grew up singing with her sisters, and found her voice across the facets of neo-soul, jazz, and R&B. She’s crafted a genre-defying style that celebrates the power and dexterity of her voice. Slippery and acrobatic at times, earthy and urgency-filled at others, her voice has been called “smoothly captivating” by the Daily Hampshire Gazette. Her songwriting beautifully captures the spectrum of her vocal range, and the singular control she has over her instrument. Her debut album Breastfed (2018) is a bittersweet chronicle of growth towards the light. Produced by LuxDeluxe bassist Jacob Rosazza, the LP features lush string arrangements and moving harmonies. The single How Am I Sposta Know placed in top 10 in 93.9 The River’s Best New Songs of 2018. Her EP One More Holiday (2021) builds on her jazz roots for a classic Christmas sound. The title track, about the death of her mother, “captures the way that the season of joy can also intensify the feeling of loss… during the holiday season,” wrote the Greenfield Recorder. She launched the album with a Christmas-themed variety night in her native Northampton. As a writer, Diggs’ personal essays, short fiction, and poetry has been published widely, earning her a Callaloo Fellowship in Poetry in 2017. In 2020, she headlined the Emily Dickinson Museum’s Tell It Slant poetry festival, performing live from Emily Dickinson’s historic bedroom. More recently, to commemorate Black History Month in 2022, she released a cover of Solange’s “Cranes in the Sky,” a song that documents a journey towards self-love. Her single They Can Say What They Like, released in 2021 on A-Side B-Side Records, written to benefit Cancer Connection, Inc., raising over $2000 for the organization. It placed #6 in 93.9 The River’s Best New Songs of 2021. Her sophomore album is expected in late 2022 Wallace Field Like a bird to its nest, the hauntingly ethereal voice of newcomer singer-songwriter Wallace Field calls you right to the core of her heartbreakingly beautiful songwriting. No emotion is too sacred to explore. Trained as a journalist once upon a time, Field now uses this lens to create acute articulations of grief, growth, and all of the challenges and silver linings that come with change. The Valley Advocate draws comparisons to Joan Baez, and The Tonemill hails Field as a “marvelous story adaptor as well as a storyteller.” She released her debut EP “Crystal Mirror'' in January 2021 and is currently working on her debut studio album. wallacefieldmusic.com Erisy Watt Portland-OR-based Erisy Watt will release her sophomore album Eyes like the Ocean on April 1 via American Standard Time Records. This is the highly anticipated follow-up to her 2019 debut hailed by No Depression as “an exercise in what contemporary folk today sounds like at its peak.” Having shared stages with revered acts including John Craigie, Hurray For The Riff Raff, and Dustbowl Revival, Erisy returns with a lovingly crafted, sophisticated collection of softly celestial folk songs, recorded live-to-tape and masterfully produced by Y La Bamba's Ryan Oxford. Erisy’s sound reliably alludes to iconic vocalists of the 1960s, but here, finds a more fitting home in the vintage-tinged indie ether of Bedouine, Haley Heynderickx, or Julie Byrne. Her vocals are intimate and alluring, an artful alternation between soothing whispers and gentle howls, backed by an instrumental bigness that evokes windy mountainscapes and piercing blue skies. Throughout Eyes like the Ocean, Erisy calls upon the expanse of earth and sky to navigate life as an adult woman—satiating restlessness, finding connection, and fostering that ever elusive sense of self that allows one peace. Erisy Watt grew up in Nashville, but it wasn’t until she left the city of music for college in California that she began writing her own songs. Both of these formative settings are present in her creative instinct—Nashville’s knack for a timeless melody, California’s bewildering vastness and dusty free spirit—but upon these sonic bones lives a body of global adventure. Erisy is an environmental professional with a deep fondness for nature and has spent time in eclectic locales like Nepal, Thailand, and Hawaii, most often in rugged, remote wilderness. She approaches the music profession with a similar sense of purity; she once toured Europe on foot, banjo on her back. This wide-open way of moving through a capacious planet enlivens Erisy’s music with true troubadour soul. Her songs spring not so much from one place in particular as from a series of well worn travel journals. This stretch of inspiration calls for acute musical capacity, and fortuitously, Erisy no doubt knows what she’s doing. An accomplished multi-instrumentalist, she can walk up and down a fretboard in gymnastic jazz chords, craft complex guitar patterns in a wide range of tempos, and masterfully press her vocal performances past previous limits. In the midst of recording her debut album in 2018, Erisy underwent surgery to remove a problematic polyp on her vocal cord. While the diagnosis and procedure proved traumatic, Erisy discovered a new vocal freedom in the healing process. Today, she describes the feeling of being uninhibited, both physically and creatively, as integral to her artistic evolution. The transformation is most palpable on crossover hit "Big Sky," one of Erisy's oldest songs, which she polished to shine. On Eyes like the Ocean, Erisy lets her newly liberated talent shimmer, but her real art is in connection: tracing the invisible vessels between an ocean’s black depth and a mountain peak’s twinkling tip, tracking the slow immensity of glacial paths to the monstrous canyons they carve. She ties her insides to the outside, taking tips from the cosmos, a naturalist with a knapsack of stardust, making luminescent the dark parts of her path, finding a way forward. Dine at GCA! Judd’s Bar & Restaurant is open Wednesday through Saturday from 5pm to 10pm. Small bites are available during all concerts at The Famous Cafe starting at 7pm. Kimaya Diggs, Wallace Field Erisy Watt