Silence - Day 18 on Musical Advent Calendar

Today, Day 18 on the Musical Advent Calendar, brings “Silence” – in two forms. Allison Crowe’s brilliance as composer and performer is wondrously evident in each recording – captured a decade apart – and both created in the same, real-time, as the experience of listening.

Firstly, here’s Allison solo, singing and playing in a friend’s log-home on Salt Spring Island, Canada. This 2006 recording was released just last year on her “Sylvan Hour” album – described by pioneering culture blog Muruch as “truly a masterpiece” (http://music.allisoncrowe.com/album/sylvan-hour).

Second version of “Silence', open Day 18 on the Musical Advent Calendar, is this recording, live-off-the-floor – found on Allison Crowe and Band’s 2016 debut, “Heirs+Grievances” (http://music.allisoncrowe.com/album/heirs-grievances) – an album that’s marvellously enjoyable testament to Crowe’s “absolute personal commitment" to song (Some Diurnal Aural Awe) and “artistic genius” (The Celtic Music Fan):

Each day through Christmas delivers a new song – and today, a pair of recordings - opening on Allison Crowe’s Musical Advent Calendar @ http://allisoncrowe.com/MusicalAdventCalendar2016.html

Portugal Embraces the Music of Allison Crowe

July 1st we celebrate Canada here – still we are part of the main, a global, cultural, community, and this week, Allison Crowe’s licensed her music for play in stores and market-places throughout continental Europe’s western-most country, the republic of Portugal. Her songs will be heard daily across the Algarve’s beautiful coast, the archipelagos of the Azores and Madeira, in the open air of Lisbon’s artful street galleries, riding the slopes and falls of the country’s lush interior, its mountainous northern region, mingling in the mystery and magic of coastal Alentejo. Up and down the Iberian Peninsula this sound we know and love will ring out.

Why Portugal? There’s a full palette of joys and emotions to be discovered in the art of Allison Crowe. In certain of her songs, too, there is ‘saudade’ – that quality described as “a bitter-sweet, existential yearning and hopefulness towards something over which one has no control”. The “unassailable determinism which compels the resigned yearning of saudade” is the soul of Portugal’s Fado music.

Here, now is Allison Crowe and Band with the sounds of “Silence”: