专辑简介

The WAVES album is unusual, in that it’s both the new Ocean Orchestra album, and the lost New St. George album! When the New St. George, the English folk-rock band that starred Jennifer, Lisa, and Rico, broke up in the 1990s, we had been planning to release an album called Johnny Has Gone Electric. We had tracks for that disc recorded at various levels of completion, but none of it was ready for release. We decided to revisit some of those tracks here, so that about half of these songs have been with us for over twenty years. Longtime New St. George fans will recognize them from our live sets back in the band’s heyday. The rest of the album consists of new material written and arranged around themes of setting out and returning. The changing seasons, life’s ups and downs, and even the transition called Death are summed up in the metaphor of the wave, which recedes and returns like an ongoing conversation. In live performances, the Ocean Orchestra is a seven-person group, but for recording projects we are a global family of kindred musical spirits. We nab touring geniuses like guitarist Clive Gregson for a quick day in the studio. We bring friends like singer John Roberts and guitarist Pete Kennedy down from points north to work with us. We work with musicians all over the world, including Troy Donockley and Polly Bolton (UK). We enjoyed collaborating with Seattle sea music duo William Pint and Felicia Dale, who paid an extended visit to Maryland in 2012. And of course, we draw on our local D.C. community’s best musicians, including John Wubbenhorst from the world music scene, Ben Bokor from the jazz community, and Sue Richards, Zan McLeod, and Rosie Shipley from our D.C.-Baltimore Celtic scene.

Woven among the threads of Scottish, Irish, and English traditional music, you will hear other strands as well. They’re the many kinds of music Jennifer has loved and played, including 1960s folk-rock, jangle-pop, art-rock, classic southern rock, church organ, Broadway, Bollywood, singer-songwriter, and jazz. We hope you enjoy the result!