Notes
Palmer is a natural singer, songwriter Can stand beside jazz, country greats By STEPHEN PEDERSEN Arts Reporter, HalifaxChronicle Herald Tena Palmer is a no-frills singer. Unpretentious, low-key, audience friendly, a natural performer - she saves her fire for her music. Technically she's a virtuoso. Expressively she's a rare one, right up there with the jazz great ones - Ella, Billie, Sarah - in her ability to take us into the heart of the song: she gives us the gift of discovering depths and nuances of feeling in ourselves we never suspected we had. But she also sings country and bluegrass, and requires no handicap to stand alongside Patsy Cline. The two singers are similar both in style and in the conviction that the music is as much about the quiet, universal passion that gives birth to it as it is about heartbreak and loneliness. As a songwriter, Palmer's gift for metaphor takes a simple song about the loneliness of a touring musician and shifts it into warp drive, not so much propelling the song into a wider universe of human isolation, and the alienation it generates, as instantaneously bringing that wider universe home into the here and now of the concert hall. Songwriting comes as naturally to Palmer, apparently, as her vocal agility in navigating both a wide range of notes (some high enough to qualify as squeaks) and her rainbow palette of timbres. She sang a song about looking for a missing hairclip after listening to West Virginia mining songs. But the song is really about women musicians late for a gig. It's a country blues and Palmer wailed it out, pulling notes around the top of the chord changes like taffy. Most of her songs were originals, but she also sang choice compositions by Gordon Lightfoot, Merle Travis, Mason Daring and Jimmy Driftwood. The lady has taste as well as talent. Of her own songs, Christmas in Antarctica was typical of her originality and her intellectual curiosity about the strangeness of our planet: Christmas near the South Pole occurs in high summer with 24 hours of perpetual daylight. Ottawa Citizen, April 23, 2005 Entertainment / Recordings Roving Tena has a lot to say North Atlantic Drift **** Tena Palmer with John Geggie and Dan Artuso (Independent) By Doug Fischer Everything we know about Tena Palmer tells us she's a restless spirit. Best known in Ottawa as the daringly evocative singer for Chelsea Bridge, the early - '90s Celtic-jazz quartet, Palmer has traveled well beyond the usual boundaries since then, musically and geographically. For six years, she hung out in Reykjavik, Iceland, a creative breeding ground where she threw herself into projects that included adventures in alt-bluegrass, bossa nova, choral music, electronics and poetry. She also recorded her debut solo CD, Crucible, part of a five-disc series of experimental music that made something of a splash in Europe. Along the way came tours of Scandinavia, a home in the Netherlands, frequent trips to North America for concerts and recording, all of it culminating ( and hey, why not?) in a 2003 move to Ottawa and a teaching gig at Carleton. "I've always had this need to keep moving", she said around the time she settled in Ottawa. "That applies to my life and my music. Who knows how long I'll be here?" Two years later, palmer is still in town. And if North Atlantic Drift is any measure, the layover has provided just the reflective balm to soothe that unruly spirit. The recording is a deeply personal travelogue about life on the road, about the hours spent with and without lovers, about longing and loneliness, about the tutg between the need to put down roots and the pull of the highway. "I play on the road/with no one to pick-up the phone/when it's late and I call my home", she sings on Dexterous Western Men, a bitter-sweet tale of love-gone-off-the-rails that sets the stage for what's to come. And what follows is a mix of originals and unexpected covers - old nuggets like My Buddy, modern heart-tuggers like Tom Wa
