Barn Songs

When Fay Victor found herself struggling to break into New York City's jazz scene in the '90s, the singer and composer took a gamble on moving to Amsterdam to reinvent herself. By day, she'd ride her bike to the library and pick up albums and sheet music to play on her piano at home. During nights, she immersed herself in the city's vivid avant-garde music clubs and venues'a move that transformed Victor from a straight ahead jazz singer into a daring vocal improviser. Over 20 years later, Victor has revisited these Amsterdam compositions for Barn Songs, her tenth album as a bandleader. Recoding alongside cellist Marika Hughes and alto saxophonist Darius Jones, the experimental project came to fruition in a tumble-down barn Hughes owns in the northern foothills of the bucolic Catskills Mountains. The trio turned the building into an organic recording compound for three days, complete with passings birds and squirrels adding naturalistic ambience to the mix. Remarkably, the songs Victor wrote while living another life in another country reveal themselves to be prescient commentary on the modern way we live today.