CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
Madeleine Peyroux
Part of Late Nights at Zankel Hall.
Performers
Madeleine Peyroux, Vocals
Jon Herington, Guitar
Barak Mori, Bass
Event Duration
The program will last approximately 90 minutes with no intermission.Presented by Carnegie Hall in partnership with WFUV.
In the Artist's Own Words
The story starts with a concert in
the countryside of England in the tiny village of Great Milton, Oxfordshire,
where we were invited to play by Raymond Blanc for Belmond Le Manoir in October
2015. St. Mary’s Church dates back to Norman times. Its small, musty,
stone-and-wooden reverb is rich with 10 centuries of history. This is where I
heard the sound for this record, enveloped in the bosom of a soulful room.
Guitarist Jon Herington, upright bassist Barak Mori, and I had been building
our trio repertoire for two years, playing all kinds of rooms, exploring the
intimate in all kinds of music—blues, gospel, Americana, even dub reggae. Each
song we added gave me a sense of awe, a reverence for the small, everyday
trials of our lives. They are personal, disarming, and honest, and they come
from all kinds of places and eras. But their rendering, if only by its
sincerity, intends to share a universal message. Somehow I felt this little
church gave us the sanctuary we needed for that to be heard.
We returned the following January to record, including a performance for the
local townspeople. Post concert I received a most gracious compliment, that our
show filled the hall with spiritual humanism. This is the result of those
recordings, and it is in this vein that I titled the album Secular Hymns.
—Madeleine Peyroux
Bios
Madeleine Peyroux
Twenty years after her recording debut, Dreamland, Madeleine Peyroux continues
her musical journey of exploring beyond the ordinary with Secular Hymns, a
spirited and soulful masterwork of loping, skipping, sassy, feisty, and sexy tunes
delivered in a captivating mélange of funk, blues, and jazz. With her trio that had been
touring together for two years--electric guitarist Jon Herington and upright bassist Barak
Mori--Peyroux set out to record in a live setting a collection of songs that have their own
hymn-like stories of self-awareness and inner dialogue, a communal consciousness and a
spiritual essence.
"Music has been our spiritual life," she says. "So I think of these as hymns, secular
hymns--songs that are very individual, personal, introverted."
With her seductively expressive voice, Peyroux intimately renders tunes by seminal blues
artists (two penned by Willie Dixon and one by Lil Green), the classic gospel singer Sister
Rosetta Tharpe, the under-the-radar dub star Linton Kwesi Johnson, three renowned
contemporary composers (Tom Waits, Townes Van Zandt, Allen Toussaint), the 19th-century
composer Stephen Foster (considered to be the first great songwriter in America), and
ending with a traditional African American spiritual.
What's remarkable is the unique way in which this recording came to life. The story starts
with a concert in an old church in the rural Oxfordshire countryside of England. Celebrated
French chef Raymond Blanc had purchased an old manor in the tiny village of Little Milton
and renamed it Belmond Le Manoir--a site where he hosts events, including a nine-course
meal in his Michelin-starred restaurant. As a part of the whole experience, people are
invited before dinner to go to the nearby 12th-century Norman-styled church, St. Mary the
Virgin, to attend a concert of live music. Last year, Peyroux and her trio were invited to
perform.
"At the sound check, I was singing Randy Newman's song 'Guilty,' and it was amazing the
way my voice sounded in the cavernous room," Peyroux says. "It has a wood ceiling that gave
my voice a reverb. My live engineer Doug Dawson told me I should make a record
there."
Fresh from the rarefied experience of performing their songbook there, a few
months later they all returned to the church with Peyroux wanting to document the secular
hymnal she and her band had been developing on the road. "We had all become very close, and
we were stretching to come up with new sounds," the acoustic guitarist says, noting that
she had added a guilele (an acoustic, nylon-stringed tenor ukulele) to the voice of the
band. "Jon became very versatile on the guitar and Barak was good with the bow. Plus they
both like to sing. "
Peyroux booked the 200-seat church for three days--first day for set up and sound check,
second for a free live show for townspeople that was recorded, and third to recut new live
takes sans audience, if needed. "It was a blast playing with Jon and Barak, and so much had
to do with the interplay among us," says Peyroux. "It's a recording that reflects the
organic way we had been working as a trio on the arrangements of these songs."
While noting that they veer away from being "the normal jazz trio," Peyroux nonetheless
brings her jazz sensibility into roots music territory in such a moving way that she
captures the celebration and praise implied in the songs--a special 10-song collection of
bona fide Secular Hymns.