8:00pm.
AM Higgins and Black Diamond
Folk and modern at the same time, pop and dreamlike by turns, AM Higgins' music feeds on other landscapes: those of the heart and soul. The voice is warm and soft, in tune with the undergrowth where her songs are born, tender and fragile but superbly arranged with organ, piano, drums, and subtle electronic touches.
This night at Constellation will mark Annie Higgins’ first performance back in Chicago since her move to France in 2017. Black Diamond will play a duo set and then join on her set. The idea was born on a recent tour in France when the two groups collaborated, bonded and experimented, bringing to life the arrangements from her new album, The Dream Trap. Frequent collaborators Jason Toth (drums) & Casey Foubert (bass, guitar, vocals) will be joining this night as well.
Annie first turned heads and hearts in Chicago with the all-girl, mostly-strings band, Singing in the Abbey. It was with them, in the warm glow of the Hideout, that she first met her collaborator and later husband, Jason Toth (The Handsome Family, Daniel Knox). The two formed Weatherman with composer and sound artist, Joshua Dumas.
Restlessness led Annie to a reclusive residency in the foothills of the French Pyrenees in 2015. Here the seeds of a very different kind of artistic life were planted. Wandering around the region, the couple managed to get a rental car stuck on a street they shouldn’t have driven down and thus the rural village they now call home was chosen for them. In this landscape, Annie lives embedded in the nature of the surrounding hills and uses songwriting to reflect that beauty back, as evident on her first album as AM Higgins, Hymning. The album was finished and mixed with the help of Casey Foubert (Sufjan Stevens, The Shins, Richard Swift, Pedro the Lion). It was released on Toulouse indie label Victorialand Records in late 2021 and received an enthusiastic response from the french press.
Their follow up record, The Dream Trap, is a grief record, but not the kind you think. Annie wrote and arranged the music that she needed to hear while grieving; music that speaks to the mystery while wrapping you in comfort. The songs came to her in dreams, born from longing. They are gentle expressions of the tenderness of divine love. The Dream Trap will be released on We Are Unique Records on February 21, 2025, alongside an EU tour supporting My Brightest Diamond.
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> > Black Diamond:
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> > Artie Black - reeds, shruti, percussion, sampler
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> > Hunter Diamond - reeds, percussion, sampler
> > Black Diamond thrives on the chemistry and compositions of saxophonists Artie Black and Hunter Diamond. They met while studying with David Baker and Tom Walsh at Indiana University. A mutual admiration for the collaborative recordings of saxophonists Lee Konitz and Warne Marsh led them to experiment with their own two-tenor palette, and it quickly became apparent that the variance in their tonal and artistic approaches created a captivating sense of balance. Now 14 years and four albums into their artistic partnership, and after having spent more than a decade immersed in the Chicago creative music scene, they operate freely as both an improvising duo and a composition-based quartet. Their latest recording "Furniture of the Mind Rearranging" (We Jazz) features both formations at length.
blackdiamondchicago.com [
http://blackdiamondchicago.com/]
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