Tuesday April 13 • The Music Gallery presents
BABY DEE + JOSEPHINE FOSTER
Double bill
Part of the Pop Avant series

Doors 8pm, concert 9pm
Tickets $15 advance at Rotate This, Soundscapes + TicketWeb.ca — BUY NOW!
At the door: $20 regular, $15 member, senior & student

The Music Gallery is pleased to present a rare double bill, featuring two of the most iconoclastic singer/songwriters in the contemporary American music scene — Cleveland/New York pianist/harpist Baby Dee (accompanied by a pair of cellists) and Chicago/Colorado acoustic guitarist Josephine Foster (performing solo).

Baby Dee
Performance artist, songwriter, classically trained harpist, circus sideshow veteran, and transgender street legend Baby Dee was born in 1953 in Cleveland, Ohio. She spent ten years as music director and organist for a Catholic church in the Bronx before joining the circus as the bilateral hermaphrodite at Coney Island. This landed her a gig as the bandleader for performance art group the Bindlestiff Family Circus and a tour with the Kamikaze Freak Show in Europe. After moving back to New York City, she became a fixture in lower Manhattan with a street act on a high-rise tricycle with a concert harp. She recorded her first record, Little Window, on the Durtro label in 2000, a four-track EP in 2001, and her second full-length, the double-disc Love's Small Song, in 2002, both released by David Tibet of Current 93. Dee returned to Ohio during the latter record's recording, taking vows as a novitiate of the Little Sisters of Crabby Doom (a Cleveland-based order dedicated to the care of smelly old men), vows that she has since forsaken. For her third full-length recording, Dee recruited a typically eclectic army of fellow musicians, including Will Oldham, Andrew W.K., Robbie Lee, Max Moston (Antony and the Johnsons), Bill Breeze (Psychic TV), John Contreras (Current 93), James Lo (Chavez), and Lia Kessel. The resulting Safe Inside the Day arrived in January 2008 on Drag City Records.

Josephine Foster
As a teen, Colorado-born singer/songwriter/guitarist Josephine Foster honed her vocal skills at weddings and funerals. Her initial career aspirations leaned toward opera, but as she neared her 20s it was the music of Tin Pan Alley and early British folk that became her muse, resulting in a series of demos that would eventually morph into 2000’s ukulele-heavy There Are Eyes Above and 2001’s collection of children’s songs entitled Little Life. She eventually relocated to Chicago, where she spent her days as a singing teacher and her evenings performing with her various bands, including Born Heller (a sparse and spooky duo featuring free jazz bassist Jason Ajemian) and the Children’s Hour (a whimsical indie pop band with fellow Windy City songwriter Andrew Bar). Foster returned to her solo career for 2004’s All the Leaves Are Gone, a ghostly and occasionally jarring collection of folk-infused psychedelic rock tunes with her newly formed backing band, The Supposed. It was followed in 2005 by the quiet, rustic, and bluesy Hazel Eyes, I Will Lead You. A Wolf in Sheep's Clothing, an acid-washed rendering of 19th century-style art songs culled from the works of Schubert, Schumann, and Brahms, was released in 2006, followed by This Coming Gladness in 2008 and Graphic as a Star in 2009.