New York, NY (Top40 Charts) Beset by an unraveling marriage and a crisis of direction Up From The Bitterroot is a startling document of personal reflection and transformation painted against the wild and often surreal backdrop of the Rockies in winter.
Skye Steele fled New York City and spent a month hiding out in a cabin deep in the woods of Montana's Bitterroot Valley. "My marriage was unraveling and I was either hiding out or clearing my head, depending on who you ask."
Steele set about a monk-like daily ritual that included collecting dream-journals at dawn, writing a song each morning, studying Bach's sonatas for solo violin in the afternoon, and taking nightly runs by flashlight up the icy mountain road.
Returning home to New York in mid-winter and facing the bewilderment of moving on, Steele gathered an idiosyncratic band whose membership was dictated by deep personal trust rather than conventional concerns of instrumentation. The band functions like a chamber ensemble with instruments swirling around each other in improvised counterpoint, switching roles to shape the emotional arc of each song, and four unique voices coloring the fabric they collectively weave.
The quartet of multi-instrumentalists, and improvisers spent the rest of the spring and summer refining the raw materials from the woods, finally entering the studio in early fall and recording basic tracks for an entire album live in two days.
"Working on this album was such a cathartic labor of love that completing it brought on some very mixed emotions—joy and excitement and pride, but also a sense of loss," Steele explains. "I see putting the album out as partly a way to give meaning and value to all that pain."
A record this unusual should come as no surprise from a musician whose path has been anything but conventional. Steele is the son of an army officer and a classical violinist, whose upbringing included years living on military bases, but also home-schooling and months-long cross-country trips in a Volkswagen camper—not to mention violin lessons from age three. Arriving in New York at seventeen to pursue a creative writing degree, Steele soon took to playing his fiddle in the subways for grocery money. His repertoire then ranged from Fritz Kreisler to Thelonious Monk, and before long he had fallen in with a crowd of jazz musicians who encouraged his hunger for improvisation, leading him to enroll in The New School's jazz program.
From there the fiddler's winding path twined on from the belly dance band that played vintage Arabic pop at underground parties, to the 20's-style big band recording with
Rufus Wainwright for a
Martin Scorsese soundtrack. There was the Brazilian band that wound it's way from the mangroves of Recife all the way to the stage of Farm Aid where Willie
Nelson sat in for a few numbers. A chance meeting with
Vanessa Carlton at the Bitter End that lead to an ongoing six-year collaboration, and epic shows with, Joey Arias and Mx. Justin Vivian Bond, queens of the old Downtown. "I've gone from playing in the subways to playing at Carnegie Hall—and loved them both."
Through a decade of paying dues, a restless spirit was gleaning grist for its mill, and on Up From The Bitterroot he steps forward with an unmistakable voice as singer, poet, and fiddler. Skye Steele's tale of wrenching heartache, loss, and moving on, burns bright thanks to the broad palette of a well-traveled artist, and the afterimage will hang haunting before your eyes long after you turn away.
