IMPORTANT See Lamplighter post regarding these shows.

Peter Mulvey plumbs the depths.

Claudia Schmidt “To say that Schmidt is simply a performer with a talent to entertain would be a miscarriage of understatement. Schmidt takes her audiences into her world as easily as the child who discovers the endless universes that exist in a cardboard box.

From lying on sandy beaches under an endless barrage of northern lights, to the expected anguish and frustration of spinning tires on cars stuck deep in snow, from the age-old struggle of change between adolescence and adulthood to the observation of sheer idiocy, she leaves it to the imagination of her audience to conjure their own images of her storytelling and song. No interpretation of a Claudia Schmidt song or story is wrong-she invites audiences to tie their associations to her style.

Schmidt weaves her way through her concert in much the same manner as a jester. Interwoven anecdotes, revealing her past and present, bring people to expect a relationship between themselves and memories driven deep with the passage of time. The concert is an endless display of self-realization through humor and longing, leaving audience members yearning to become an integral part of her world.”
Door County Advocate

Dayna Kurtz‘s depth is akin to the Nina Simone not only as a vocalist but as an interpreter and writer. A real equal opportunity purveyor of human musical expression, she defies categorization while giving a big-boned, highly emotive concentration to all she interprets or originates. “I’m not of the jazz, blues, folk, R&B, rock, or pop worlds enough to belong to any of them, but all of those things are in there,” she says.

Kurtz began performing as a teenager, and has had a solo touring career ever since. She opened for Richie Havens, who became a fan and lent vocals to her debut studio album, Postcards from Downtown. Dayna keeps winning over new fans in the music scene. In the past two years she has been invited to open up for Rufus Wainwright, Antony & the Johnsons, and Keren Ann. Additionally, she has an admirer in fellow “Living Room” habitué Norah Jones, who sings a duet with her on “I Got It Bad…” (From Beautiful Yesterday). The legendary Richard Thompson invited her to open up for a coast-to-coast nationwide tour that found Dayna converting some of his faithful fans.

And she’s not just a riveting singer. Her guitar playing is flexible enough to take her to the musical places she visits, whether she’s plucking an open pattern with an oddly cabaret feel or strumming some attitude into the bluesy realm.

Her latest recordings are Secret Canon Vol. 1, a late night smoky collection of lost nuggets from the mid-century jazz and early R&B cut out bins, and American Standard, which leans a little more toward country blues, and is mostly original music despite the title.

Bill Camplin can smoke with the best of them.  http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rMsKXaVFQho