Electric & Acoustic Cellist, Vocalist and Composer
ONLY BREATH
©2007 Jami Sieber
 Track List:
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What happens when you mix the heart-melting magic of Jami Sieber's music ("Hidden Sky", "Second Sight", "Lush Mechanique") with the mind-opening power of some of the greatest poetry of all time? "Only Breath" is a revolutionary meeting between music and poetry that merges poems from around the world with compositions that flow from the depths of stillness to wild world-beat rhythms. Electric cellist/vocalist Jami Sieber, reaches inside the soul with her passionate playing and compositions that are contemporary and powerfully evocative. Kim Rosen's gift of speaking poems has made her a voice for poetry's power to awaken, inspire, and heal. Together, they create a startling and beautiful dialogue, where the spoken poem becomes a layer of the music and the music an essential voice within the poem. "Only Breath" is a river of sound that carries the listener seamlessly through many landscapes of the heart. Intricately interlaced currents of music and poetry move from the prayerful ecstasy of Sieber's pulsing cello and vocals as they meld with Pablo Neruda's poem, "Poetry," to the tumultuous flood of percussion, flute, bass, vocals and cello that carries Stanley Kunitz's famous "King of the River," to the stunning rhythms, Native American chanting and rap vocals of the trance-dance that celebrates Rumi's poem, "Only Breath." The CD closes with Derek Walcott's "Love after Love," set in a velvet-deep quartet of cellos with guitars, percussion and bass. "Give wine. Give bread," the poem invites. "Give back your heart to itself, to the stranger who has loved you all your life...Sit. Feast on your life." "Only Breath" is an invitation to rediscover what mystics, poets and shamans have known for centuries: when you join powerful rhythms with the language of the heart, the mind bursts open to an unsayable "Ahhh!" of pure revelation. Sieber and Rosen are joined on "Only Breath" by talented musicians Ulali, Steve Gorn, Kai Eckhardt, Julie Wolf, Michaelle Goerlitz, Erika Luckett, Rhiannon, David Worm, Benjy Wertheimer and others. |