The North Columbia Monthly April 1995

Beyond Folk

By Michael Pickett

There is a reason why Oregon-based artist, Alice Di Micele, enthralled a packed house at Cafe al Mundo on March 6th. It's the same reason she has shared the stage with the likes of David Lindley, Michelle Shocked, and Country Joe McDonald: she is an amazing talent.

Di Micele's two sets of mostly original material could be described as daring and triumphant songs of healing and survival, taking the common notion of folk music into original and compelling territory.

Whereas many of the folk performances I've attended amounted to one lone concerned citizen working a capo up and down the guitar neck, desperately trying to wrangle another song out of the same three chord position, Di Micele's compositions are expansive and memorable.

Her voice is powerful, rich with the tradition of great blues and a distinctive vibrato that's all her own. She is a master of enunciation, turning a string of "la's" into a symphony, able to stop a syllable in mid-flight to sculpt it into something forceful and punctuated.

Add to this a guitar accompaniment that fleshed out the music with smooth fingerpicking and wonderfully colorful jazz voicings, and you have a performer that flat-out surpasses much of the heartfelt mediocrity of contemporary players.

In support of her fifth album, "Naked," on her own Alice Otter Music label, Di Micele eased from the uptempo groove of I Don't Know What It Is and Bring Back the Rain, to the slow blues of the evening's standout, Richard M. Jones' Trouble In Mind, absolutely super-charged by her searing, soaring, scatladen vocals and comped jazz chords. And if Di Micele got intense in her views on personal activist ideals, she rounded it out with the wry wit and commonality themem of her album's title track: "Underneath the clothes (we're) wearing/When it's said and done/We're all just naked."

All in all, a powerful performer we hope to see again soon.