• Ollabelle with Special Guest Jim White
• 10:00pm

Ollabelle

A multi-talented, democratic collective whose participants share vocal and songwriting duties, Ollabelle gains strength from its members' shared sense of mission, as well as their diverse musical and personal backgrounds. Although the group initially began as a casual sideline to the musicians' individual projects, it quickly evolved into a full-time creative entity with an unmistakable life of its own.

The intimate immediacy of the band's performances is well suited to the emotional gravity of their new material. "I think that there's an undercurrent of reckoning with loss and adversity in this group of songs," Patscha observes, adding, "To me, they're all battle songs. Life isn't easy, and the good things in life are truly worth fighting for. The tricky part is that these big battles happen within every person, not across the street or across the ocean. At the end of the day, we will all wind up by that river and will have to reckon with our own truths. And I think the title of the album reflects an admiration for those people that have had the courage to write and sing about those truths."

Amy Helm—vocals, mandola

Byron Isaacs—vocals, bass, dobro

Tony Leone—vocals, drums, percussion

Fiona McBain—vocals, acoustic and electric guitars

Glenn Patscha—vocals, keyboards, accordion

FRIENDS

ABOUT JIM WHITE

Southern Gothic singer/songwriter Jim White grew up in Pensacola, Florida, enamored with the sounds of the white gospel music he heard on the Gospel Jubilee television series. After spending his formative years on the outskirts of a deeply Pentecostal community, he entertained a career as a professional surfer, followed by a stint in Milan as a fashion model.

A band-saw accident which resulted in a maimed left hand seemed to end White's hopes as a musician, but after writing a collection of simple songs on his guitar, a friend convinced him to record a demo which ultimately made its way to the offices of David Byrne's Luaka Bop label. After re-recording the songs, White issued his debut Wrong-Eyed Jesus!-- a collection of atmospheric, oddly spiritual country-folk performances -- in 1997.

No Such Place was issued in early 2001. In 2004 White released Drill a Hole in That Substrate and Tell Me What You See, again on Luaka Bop, which featured such eccentric guests as the Barenaked Ladies, Aimee Mann, and Bill Frisell. 2005 saw the release of Jim White Presents Music from Searching for a Wrong-Eyed Jesus, a soundtrack to the surrealist road film by director Andrew Douglas that featured material by White, the Handsome Family, 6 Horsepower and others. Transnormal Skiperoo arrived in 2007, followed by the live EP Funny Little Cross to Bear in early 2009.