Jolie Holland + Jo Mango / 11.09 / The Glad Cafe, Glasgow

Jolie Holland is an American singer and performer who combines elements of folk, traditional country, jazz, and blues.

Over the span of her career, Jolie Holland has knotted together a century of American song—jazz, blues, soul, rock and roll—into some stew that is impossible to categorize with any conventional critical terminology. This is her burden and her gift, to know all of these American songs of the last ten decades in her head and her heart, and to have to wrestle with their legacy. She dives straight to the pathos of a song the way the very greatest singers, singers like Mavis Staples, or Al Green, or Skip James, or Tom Waits do. Upon first encounter her songs seem challenging, perhaps unsettling at times, but as so many poets and rockers have shown us (from Dante Alighieri to William Blake to Sylvia Plath to Patti Smith to Nick Cave to Mark E. Smith) that’s where the beauty lies. As evident on her first recordings, Holland apparently has no fear of the truth, and there is no emotional core that she cannot reach in song. In fact she thrives on the red hot center of a musical composition, in all its strange and brutal detail.

“Noir, lived in, caustic, not entirely of this time” - Aquarium Drunkard

You may also like the following events from The Glad Cafe:

• This Sunday, 17th August, 02:00 pm, Semispecific Ensemble (all ages matinee) / 17.08 / The Glad Cafe, Glasgow in Glasgow
• Next month, 9th September, 07:30 pm, Amelia Coburn in Glasgow
• Next month, 13th September, 07:30 pm, Randolph's Leap + Harry Bird / 13.09 / The Glad Cafe, Glasgow in Glasgow

Also check out other Music events in Glasgow, Entertainment events in Glasgow, Performances in Glasgow.