Music
Press
The couple exhibit a high degree of musical understanding and work well together, and their air of easy confidence belies the fact that this is their first recording. - FATEA /UK
The couple exhibit a high degree of musical understanding and work well together, and their air of easy confidence belies the fact that this is their first recording. - FATEA /UK
[Barbara] comes up with something wholesome and truthful. She leaves traditional forms very much the way she found them, after doing them sweet, tender justice. - Bill Copeland Music News
[Barbara] comes up with something wholesome and truthful. She leaves traditional forms very much the way she found them, after doing them sweet, tender justice. - Bill Copeland Music News
Cassidy is, [a natural lyricist] and she taps effortlessly into an American story-telling-folk tradition, and does so in a way that seems utterly authentic, even recalling her own family history on “Anna's Song - Shohola, 1864”. It’s a genuine standout track, the sort of song that gets the hairs rising on the back of the neck, and that’s by no means a unique experience. - Leicester Bangs/UK
Cassidy is, [a natural lyricist] and she taps effortlessly into an American story-telling-folk tradition, and does so in a way that seems utterly authentic, even recalling her own family history on “Anna's Song - Shohola, 1864”. It’s a genuine standout track, the sort of song that gets the hairs rising on the back of the neck, and that’s by no means a unique experience. - Leicester Bangs/UK
Discography
LP: Leaving Things the Way I Found Them
© 2012 Suspicious Motives Records
EP: Fly Away
© 2013 Suspicious Motives Records
Release date: May 7, 2013
Photos
Bio
Barbara Cassidy, sings with the voice she was born with. She has, at various times, been a company member of the Free Street Theater of Chicago, riding shotgun around the country in their “Showmobile”, had a brief stint as a runway model, built a recording studio, directed new plays, performed for the inmates of Cook County Jail, worked on nationally televised science programs for PBS, taught dance and performed in summer stock, served as a living historian from 1803, and waited tables in a (maple) sugar house in her home town of Ashfield, Massachusetts. She has driven the occasional tractor and helped with the haying. She has a Master’s degree in Sociology and Women’s Studies from Brandeis University where her thesis centered on cultural images of women in torch songs of the American musical theater of the 1920s. She and Eric are co-curators of the oral history project: The Video Archive of the Electro-Acoustic Music. She is a member of Actors’ Equity and ASCAP.
Eric Chasalow grew up in northern New Jersey listening obsessively to The Beatles and Charlie Parker, and making trips into New York to hear jazz greats play live. After a childhood spent fixated on learning to play guitar, saxophone and flute and write big band charts, he went to Bates College in Maine, where he spent a considerable amount of time backpacking, fishing, beachcombing, digging clams in zero-degree weather, and studying to be a marine biologist, until seasickness convinced him otherwise. He also spent time at New England Conservatory, writing and playing with a jazz quartet and trying hard to play guitar like Norman Blake. Moving to New York City, he studied at the first electronic music studio in the US (the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center), earning a doctorate from Columbia University. While a student, he played flute on the street (in front of Zabar’s) and started a location recording business, meeting and working for countless musicians, from cellist, Carter Brey and soprano, Bethany Beardslee to composer, John Cage. His music appears on CD’s from New World Records, and he has won lots and lots of awards. Eric is now Professor of Music at Brandeis University where he teaches composition and directs BEAMS (Brandeis Electro-Acoustic Music Studio).
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