Search - Beth Anne Cole :: Gifts in the Old, Old Ground

Gifts in the Old, Old Ground is an evocative album of 12 original songs and stories that give voice to a poetic and passionate world, a world of dream-like landscapes and images that weave through layers of time and history. The songs-part folk, part jazz, part sung poem-tell stories in the poet-singer tradition. Beth Anne's crystalline voice takes us to the ancient city of Ur; the inside of a tree; the unraveling of love in the mountains above Arles in France. The musical settings create a strong, often Mediterranean feeling with guitars, bazouki, harp, warm pianos, stark horns. Beth Anne began writing topical material for her one-woman shows in her early twenties. About five years ago her writing took a turn when she had "a dream that wrote itself. I was walking alone through the streets of Jerusalem in great danger. In a bazaar in the old city I met a dark-haired woman holding a jewel to the light. The image and my 'walk' catapulted me into an exploration of my cultural history." Along the way Beth Anne delved into Yiddish folk song. A "surprise visitor" on the album is Dremlen Feygl af di Tsvayn, a Yiddish lullaby to an orphaned child in the Vilna ghetto by poet Leah Rudnitska. Beth Anne paired it with her song All the Way Home, a poignant story of her mother's childhood. "I kept getting further and further back in time," says the artist of the writing of the album. She ends with the acapella Psalm, a lovesong to King David. From the siren call of Sailor, the vivid recollection of a crumbling love in Under a Starry Sky, the urgency of Walking in Jerusalem, Beth Anne's songs seem both ancient and modern, satisfying our need for deep feeling and beautiful words.