Recorded live in San Francisco, California on the eve of the Equal Rights Amendment Ratification deadline in 1983, this recording is a collection of songs of conscience. It includes a rendition of "We Shall Go Forth! recorded with the Boston women's community and its allies which has been placed in the Smithsonian Institution's Political History Division. The San Francisco Chronicle said of this recording, "Adam's talent is so well-balanced that the listener may be at first impressed by either her voice, or her piano - or her songs." BIO Margie Adam is a rarity among musicians: she is both an accomplished singer-songwriter of elegant love songs and inspiring songs of conscience and a pianist-composer of soundtrack-style pop-jazz piano music. Her performance of "We Shall Go Forth!" resides in the Smithsonian's Political History Division; Peter, Paul & Mary, Dusty Springfield and Cris Williamson have recorded her songs. Concurrently, her instrumental work has been a regular presence on NPR for decades. It is the interplay of piano and voice, lyric and melody, of spirit and talk that is the unique theatre of Margie Adam. She is a performer with a brazenly smart wit, an intimate performance style and politically astute commentary. Margie Adam was born in Lompoc, California and started playing the piano as soon as she could climb up on the piano bench. She began her performance career at an open mic session at Kate Millett's legendary Sacramento Women's Music Festival in 1973. In the following years, she participated in the definition and expansion of women's music as an art form, a political force and an industry. SINGER, SONGWRITER, COMPOSER, ACTIVIST A fifty-city tour to promote her first album Margie Adam. Songwriter. on Pleiades Records culminated at the historic National Women's Conference in Houston in 1977 where Margie performed "We Shall Go Forth!" with 10,000 women singing three-part harmony. The song is now in the archives of the Political History Division of the Smithsonian Museum. In 1980, Margie released Naked Keys and uncovered an enthusiastic audience for solo piano music that continues today. The same year, the National Women's Political Caucus sponsored Margie on a national tour to raise funds for feminist candidates. The leadership of 80 women's organizations attended Margie's concert with Sweet Honey In the Rock and Malvina Reynolds at Constitution Hall. The event coincided with the July 1, 1982 ratification deadline of the Equal Rights Amendment. It also marked the release date of her live album We Shall Go Forth. RETURN FROM A "RADICAL'S SABBATICAL" After releasing Here Is A Love Song, a collection of her love songs, Margie came off the road in 1984 for a "Radical's Sabbatical." In the intervening years, she studied piano and voice and worked in the field of chemical dependency. To the surprise of everyone, particularly Margie Adam, she began to write music again in 1990. As she developed this new repertoire, she made the decision to perform again. The 1992 national tour which resulted led her to gather together a group of women musicians to record her sixth album, Another Place. In 1996, she recorded Soon and Again, her second solo piano recording, which inspired the THREE OF HEARTS tour with solo pianists Liz Story and Barbara Higbie. AVALON Adam's eighth recording, Avalon, was released in 2001 on her label, Pleiades Records. In order to fully explore the intention of each song, she gathered a complex mix of jazz, pop and folk players and vocalists for the effort. This collection of vocal and instrumental music is her most revealing and contemplative work to date, with her passion for community taking center stage. Margie's interest in documenting women's history and in particular the contributions of feminist lesbians, led her to join with WomanVision Films to become associate producer of "Radical Harmonies: A History of Women's Music," which premiered to enthusiastic audiences in Summer 2002. She is also associate producer for the film "No Secret Anymore: The Times of Del Martin & Phyllis Lyon" produced and directed by Joan Biren and released in 2003. LABYRINTH WORK Margie launched a collaboration with Lauren Artress, founder of Veriditas, The World-Wide Labyrinth Project in 2002. The two debuted "At The Edge: A Conversation Between Seeker and Activist with Music and the Labyrinth" at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, California. This complex mix of conversation, song, story-telling, piano improvisation, labyrinth walk and discussion was presented in various venues across the United States in 2002-03. LATEST RELEASE: PORTAL Margie Adam is currently launching an unusual 9th recording project. The quiet hum of spirit that has resonated in Margie's music from Songwriter through Avalon has now surfaced full force in PORTAL, a 2-disc CD/DVD set. This new work combines the rich contemplative core of her piano solo music with a surprising new visual element of her artistic sensibility: photography set in motion. The compilation CD, PORTAL, brings together ten solo piano performances with clear melodies, lush chord color and mesmerizing polyrhythms from Naked Keys, Soon and Again and her last release, Avalon. These pieces have emerged as the soundscape for Margie's work with the labyrinth. PORTAL to Avalon is a 7-minute DVD program playable on a television or computer screen. This "eyes open" meditation is a transporting interaction between subtly choreographed photography and mesmerizing music which creates a still space in the midst of a noisy world.