As
anyone who’s caught one of Christina Courtin’s live performances can attest,
the New York City–based musician decisively takes over whatever space she’s
occupying, her long dark hair flying behind her as she paces the stage, her
voice malleable and otherworldly, an irrepressible smile on her face
throughout. It’s not simply youthful bravado but a kind of rapture that
possesses her—the unalloyed pleasure of singing, connecting, pouring out as
much of her heart as possible in an all-too-brief set.
Making
her Nonesuch debut, though, Courtin turns her high-voltage style inside out.
Her self-titled disc is disarmingly beautiful and intimate, her voice at times
pared down to a confessional whisper, yet it’s just as compelling as her
bravura work on stage. There’s something beguiling about opening tracks “Green
Jay” and “Bundah,” as if we’ve stumbled into a reverie already in progress.
Courtin’s vocals are warm, gentle, and dreamy; she stretches out individual
words in slow motion while chamber-ensemble strings wrap themselves around
folk-rock-leaning melodies. As the disc progresses, darker, moodier sounds and
emotions lurk around the edges of her songs. One gets the sense that turmoil
lies beneath the surface, and that feeling becomes palpable by the seventh
track, the tour-de-force “Laconia.” Metal-tinged guitar chords courtesy of Jon
Brion push aside the string ensemble and Courtin’s voice turns startlingly raw
as she repeats, like Dorothy in Oz, “How did I end up here, and how do I get back?”
Perhaps
this 10-song set is a mirror of the journey Courtin herself took, from her
Buffalo, NY, home to a coveted spot at The Juilliard School to live-music
stages throughout New York City, at both its grungy clubs and its fabled
concert halls. Courtin had been studying the violin since she was three and was
gifted enough to make it into Juilliard as a violin student. Yet singing had
always been a covert passion. As Courtin recalls, “I was singing ever since I
was little; I always knew that I could. It was like this secret that I had or
something. It was weird—I was really, really embarrassed. It took me a long
time to be public about it. I just did it for fun. When I was 16, I wrote my
first songs and I thought, ‘All right, let’s make a record.’”
When
she entered Juilliard, Courtin kept writing, though she initially kept her
singing talent to herself. “It took me a while to realize what I wanted to do.
I was miserable. And then I started singing in my junior year. From there
everything changed.”
Courtin
agreed to participate in multimedia shows that her fellow Juilliard students
would put on for their after-hours entertainment, playing pop and jazz and
whatever else they weren’t getting to do in the classroom. At first, she
proceeded with caution, but after her initial terror subsided, she discovered
that performing her songs was exciting, addicting even, and she was inspired to
put together a band to play around town and to record an independently released
disc. Her Juilliard friends became her first fans: “The only friends I had at
the time in New York were people I met at school, who were all mainly classical
musicians. Luckily for me they were really supportive and came out to hear us
play in places they probably would have never set foot in otherwise. But it was
a scary experience, to have only musicians in the audience! Eventually my
friends told their friends, until the people coming to see us weren’t just
musicians anymore. Soon enough the audiences were full of people that I didn’t
know at all.” She laughs. “I guess my friends were all sick of me.”
For
Courtin, the pop and classical aspects of her career operated on parallel
tracks. She was offered the chance to work with cellist Yo-Yo Ma and his Silk
Road Ensemble at a Carnegie Hall Professional Training Workshop in 2004.
She went in to collaborate as a violinist with other musicians from
around the world, but some members of the Silk Road Ensemble “spilled the beans
and told Yo-Yo that I sang. I ended up singing a song for one of the concerts at
Zankel Hall. It was a lot of fun, and I met great people that I remain friends
with today. The experience turned me on to so many feelings and so many
people.”
Courtin was the only non-operatic singer asked to join the group
at another Carnegie Hall workshop, led by soprano Dawn Upshaw and Argentine
composer Osvoldo Golijov. Upshaw not only became a supporter and a fan, but she
suggested to her friends at her longtime label Nonesuch that perhaps they
should go hear one of Courtin’s shows. Those artistic relationships have
continued: Courtin played violin in Golijov’s La Pasión Según San Marcos (The Passion According to St. Mark) in the
Canary Islands in February and is scheduled to sing alongside Upshaw in
Dresden, Germany, this May.
Courtin
co-produced the album with bassist Greg Cohen and her frequent band-mate,
singer/guitarist Ryan Scott. The inspired choice of Cohen reflects Courtin’s
own range and ambition: he’s played live and/or recorded with John Zorn,
Ornette Coleman, Tom Waits, Antony and the Johnsons, even Woody Allen. They
chose to cut most of these songs in Los Angeles with an accomplished group of
musicians, including keyboardist Benmont Tench, drummer Jim Keltner, pedal
steel player Greg Leisz, and multi-instrumentalist Jon Brion. (Leisz helps
bring a pronounced Nashville lilt to “Foreign Country” and” One Man Down.”)
Says Courtin, “When we went out to L.A., I was pretty nervous, and didn’t
really know what to expect, musically or personality-wise. But it turned out
great. They were really, really sweet to me—and they didn’t have to be. There
was a lot of time spent talking about what instruments we were going to use on
which tunes, but there wasn’t a lot of time spent on learning the tunes. Those
guys don’t need anyone to tell them what to play, once they got a sense of the
music. Their ears are amazing. You give a song to them and out comes this
incredible arrangement. They all have killer instincts."
Additional
sessions in New York City featured guitarist Marc Ribot and pianist Rob Burger
(of the Tin Hat Trio). Pulling together the sessions from both coasts was
engineer-mixer David Boucher, who’s also recently worked with Randy Newman and
Andrew Bird. Courtin arranged most of the strings, performed by Brooklyn Rider,
a boundary-pushing string quartet that also performs as part of Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk
Road Ensemble. (To further the musical connections, the quartet’s co-founders,
brothers Colin and Eric Jacobson, lead the Knights, a chamber orchestra in
which Courtin plays.) The only thing Courtin didn’t do on this record, notably,
is play violin—“Take that, Juilliard!” she jokes—though she does contribute
some viola and toy piano to “Hedonistic Paradise.”
Appraising
her album, Courtin says, finally, “The records that I love the most are the
ones that are full of life and energy—and that doesn’t in any way mean
perfection. They have real feeling to them. One of the things I wanted to
achieve with the record was for it to be a real world of its own, with songs
and sounds that take you somewhere else.”
