The Ache of Possibility Due Nov. 10
By Caitlin McNamara
PARK SLOPE — Soul siren Capathia Jenkins has come a long way since she was a little girl singing at church, in school, and into a hairbrush in her Prospect Heights apartment.
She’s only moved as far as Park Slope, but everything else is different: the studio, the crowds and the partnership with Chicago-born composer and guitarist Louis Rosen, with whom she is about to release a third album.
With credentials including parts in “Caroline or Change” and “Love, Loss, and What I Wore” on Broadway, a national tour of “Dreamgirls,” and even an appearance in the last season finale of “30 Rock,” Jenkins knows her way around a performance. But she and Rosen are about to return to the place she calls “our New York home” — Joe’s Pub, in the Public Theater.
They have four dates in total, November 8, 14, 21 and 22. Their last performances at Joe’s Pub were sell-out events.
Jenkins and Rosen are promoting their newest album, “The Ache of Possibility,” to be released November 10. Their five years of collaboration have been fruitful, garnering glowing reviews for their first two albums from the New York Times and Chicago Tribune.
The pair first collaborated on a project after being connected by an acquaintance; Rosen needed someone to record a demo he’d written. The song was “Lullaby (For a Black Mother).”
“The literal beauty of her voice blew me away,” says Rosen. “There is great texture to it. I sat there with my mouth open. It was a perfect match, a perfect song for a perfect singer.”
After asking her to record music to Maya Angelou lyrics, something Rosen had wanted to do for a while, he proposed that he would like to write songs specifically for Jenkins.
“I didn’t take it seriously,” she says. “People always say that, and you never hear from them again.”
A few weeks later he surprised her with some tracks, Jenkins says. “We really hit it off. He is a beautiful composer. He challenges me technically and vocally. It’s been a thrill, an honor really.”
He says, “I could tell we came from the same background musically. There were strong feelings of jazz, blues and soul, but she also has technical training. It was like we found each other’s musical soul mate. Since 2005 I’ve put everything else aside to write for us.”
In addition to eight songs written by Rosen, the pop-, jazz- and blues-inspired album features four tracks with lyrics by poet Nikki Giovanni. They have been collaborators since Rosen reached out to ask if would be ok if they used her poems as lyrics for their second CD, “One Ounce of Truth: The Nikki Giovanni Songs.”
Giovanni will join them for their final Joe’s Pub performance. “When she is in town, we get her on stage,” says Jenkins. “It’s a treat for the audience. Actually it’s a treat for us, too.”
They will perform with the same group they have been with for two years. A change on this album is the absence of piano, which was an adjustment for everyone, says Rosen, but it was right for the project. The difficult part was asking their pianist to sit out the album.
Many tracks have a political lean, in part, Rosen says, because he wrote much of it last fall with the muted TV turned to Rachel Maddow or Keith Olbermann, in the Park Slope apartment he shares with his wife.
“I’d ocassionally turn it up. There was so much anticipation [at that time].”
The title track, “The Ache of Possibility,” was written a few weeks before Obama was elected. It was an idea he’d had for a few years, but he hesitated to write a song about the frustrations of the past eight years.
“But I realized it is all about this moment of now,” he says. “Then it became a metaphor for the whole album. Whether about politics or relationships, there are possibilities to be had through the choices we make.”
Others tracks are love songs. Not of youthful love, says Rosen, but rich love, “about people who have been around the block a few times, in the flux of the time, and figured out why they want to be together.”
To see Rosen and Jenkins perform, visit www.joespub.com.
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