 |
 |
 |
Archive
Date: 04/08/2010
Jerry Joseph and Wally Ingram at Otto's on April 15th
by Press Release
Some songwriters just strike down to the heart of things. Even when they're being tender they nail you in the soul's solar plexus, shaking us with words and wires and something inescapably human. Jerry Joseph is this kind of composer – a rocker with emotional scalpel that cuts deep every time. He wears his influences on his sleeve – Elvis Costello, Neil Young, John Lennon, Steve Earle – but tailors them in ways that are always distinctly himself, probing the politics of love and nations with equal dexterity. By turns tough and unbelievably bruised, Joseph's work manages to be joyfully pissed off and achingly bittersweet, often within the space of just a few verses. There's a healthy restlessness to his music, a stripe of his modernity and tireless engagement with the world that places him next to younger contemporaries like Conor Oberst (Bright Eyes) and Ryan Adams.
Currently living in Harlem, NYC, he's a tireless listener to everything that comes his way, filtering in the hip-hop of Aesop Rock and Jamaican strains that drift through his window as easily as he incorporates the more brainy, confessional strains of his core inspirations. He embodies original rock's boundary-free spirit that pulled happy handfuls from country, blues, jazz and folk to create something that struts and wails. From dub to backwoods laments, his music stretches to incorporate whatever is flipping his switch at a given moment, yet always grounded in something indefinably Jerry J. This free-ranging is most delightfully loose in the Stockholm Syndrome, his on-again, off-again collaboration with Dave Schools (Widespread Panic), Eric McFadden (EMT, P-Funk), Wally Ingram (David Lindley, Sheryl Crow) and Danny Louis (Gov't Mule), where the boys can swing from roadhouse hard to psychedelically bent.
Wisconsin-born percussionist Wally Ingram is the rock world's version of Kevin Bacon & there aren't too many degrees of separation between him and just about every star on stage over the past decade or so. A frightening battle with cancer forced Wally to step away from a magical time on the road with Eric Burdon and the Animals but he's back, healthy, happy and soaring after a massive outpouring of love and support from family, fans and friends and again playing percussion with longtime friend Sheryl Crow on the world tour in support of her incredible new Detours CD.
|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
 |
Rockford Area Arts Council
|
|
Mendelssohn Performing Arts Center
|
|
Rockford Area Music Industry
|
|
|
 |
|
|
 |
