Wendy Eisenberg + Tara Clerkin Trio

Tara Clerkin Trio at Cafe OTO

WENDY EISENBERG has spent the past decade as a fixture of independent music and an artist of inspired multiplicity. As a singer-songwriter, improviser, and virtuoso guitarist, the coordinates of their artistry are ever-shifting, from art-rock to jazz to blistering free improv and eloquent folk. On catalog highlights including 2020’s Auto and the 2024 free-jazz sprawler Viewfinder, they’ve made a signature of ambition. After spending the past five years experimenting in different bands, genres, and creative challenges, and following a period of self-confrontation that they liken to a personal exorcism, Eisenberg has arrived at a milestone. The poetic and formally daring folk songs of Wendy’s selft-titled new album (Joyful Noise) comprise their most certain vision yet.

These songs began to take root in 2020 when Eisenberg moved from Western Massachusetts - where they’d lived for a few years after attending Boston’s New England Conservatory - and relocated to Brooklyn. Longing for the pastoral feel of their former home, Eisenberg gravitated towards the warm sounds of country and folk. “The songs are genuinely folk songs,” Eisenberg says of their record. “The production is less about seeing what the guitar might be capable of and more accepting the inherent strangeness of the languages it has spoken for the last century and a half.”

https://www.wendyeisenberg.com/

TARA CLERKIN TRIO formed in Bristol (where none of them are from yet all of whom are deeply engrained) in 2020. Despite the singular authority implied by its name, they consist of the titular Tara Clerkin, her partner Sunny Joe Paradisos, and Sunny’s brother, Patrick Benjamin. With two extraordinary mini-albums – In Spring (2021) and On The Turning Ground (2023) – making a splash on London’s formidable World of Echo label in wake of their self-titled 2020 debut, this upcoming Somewhere Good LP (out now) is, in many ways, the band’s most realised work. In running their usual gauntlet of idiosyncratic (\*an o