Wilderness and Grace - Jake Berry

Now available at Bandcamp.

Listen to and download the digital version in the format of your choice, name your price (including $0). Download includes a 32 page digital booklet of lyrics, scans of the working lyric and chord charts, artwork and photos. The CD is available for $10 and includes a free download of the digital album and digital booklet.  Click here.

The video for the song "November". 

The video for the song "Starlings".

A REVIEW BY JACK RANDOM OF WILDERNESS AND GRACE 

The shadow of the American Indian looms over many of these tracks and indeed over the work as a whole. For Jake Berry’s part of the world that shadow belongs to the civilized tribe, the Cherokee and the Trail of Tears.

For the artist it is not enough simply to lament, though a lamentation is clearly felt; it requires climbing under the skin, absorbing and feeling the full range and depth of emotion and perception.

There is jazz and blues on these tracks, always a touch of jazz, for jazz is the purest poetry of music. There is country and folk as well, a fusion of influences large and small, dark and light. Jacques Brel is alive and well and coexisting with Laura Nyro, Thelonious Monk and of course the poets Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti and Marshall McLuhan. On the back cover there is Mark Twain, the old west and is that Cormac McCarthy? On the front there is an ancient opiate dream.

Through it all there is the word and the lament.

Berry cries for a vision once more and the vision comes in many forms. It is a piece of work, an aesthetic charm, a forgotten muse, a hidden desire, a debt to be posted and paid.

As with all Jake Berry works, there are many layers, too many to contemplate at once. He is an artist that will not be cornered, not confined, never to be tied down or defined.

Those who are familiar with his work will find new clues to his mystery, another secret to his genius, his connection to another world. Those who are new to Jake may find themselves mesmerized, lost in an ever-unfolding universe that offers no answers, only question upon question, each moving closer to an eternal truth.

Long live Jake Berry.

http://jakeberry.bandcamp.com/album/wilderness-and-grace