“Ct Bridge,” for instance, “is very singer-songwriterly, but it’s much more complicated harmonically, it has an odd form and it has an improvisational section that has a different harmonic structure. A Van Morrison song isn’t going to look like that on paper, but to me it’s very singer-songwriterly in nature.”
Wilson, for his part, had turned more and more to the singer-songwriter tradition by time he graduated from NEC. When I reach him in Portland, Oregon, where he returned after graduating last year, he concurs that he and Eade come to the music from complementary stances. “For her, the jazz side is out front, but then that other stuff is behind, and you can discover it as you go deeper into the songs. And for me it was the opposite; I was more overtly doing the song-oriented thing and the jazz thing was in the background. But that made for an interesting tension.”
At first, Eade resisted the idea that, say, “Go Gently to the Water” — which came to her in a dream — could be a simple three-chord tune in E, but she finally gave in. “I remember waking up and feeling very clear about the music, clear about the lyric, the melody, the harmony. Then I thought, ‘Oh my God, that’s so simple!’ And for a moment I thought, ‘Well, it can’t be that simple.’ But then I had to accept that, surrender to that, and say, yes, it actually is that simple.”
DOMINIQUE EADE + JED WILSON | Regattabar, Charles Hotel, 1 Bennett Street, Cambridge | November 14 | 617.395.7757
