Always ready to check out a black musician off the beaten path, I bought Gail Ann Dorsey’s debut CD, “The Corporate World,” way back in 1989... but I never gave it a good listen. (You know how that can go, when you’re on a music-buying binge?)Well, since then, Ms. Dorsey’s reputation as a rock-’n’-roll bass player and session vocalist has soared, especially due to her long service in David Bowie’s band. Still, she kept trying to do the solo-artiste thing.
To support her last CD, “I Used to Be...,” in 2004, Gail Ann Dorsey opened for Ani DiFranco on her European tour. One of those gigs was at the Melkweg (“Milky Way”), an Amsterdam music hall.
Fabchannel.com has Dorsey’s six-song set in streaming video.
Alas, that video is not embeddable. You must follow this link to watch it. And you can’t skip between songs; it only runs start to finish. But you can see what this Philadelphia-born, upstate-New-York-based performer is all about.
The Melkweg show is an unplugged solo set; four of the songs are from the 2004 CD. To be quite honest, that introspective acoustic bittersweet singer-songwriter Lilith Fair womyn-with-a-Y type stuff isn’t my favorite kind of music. I like a little more swing, a little more zing.
But Gail Ann Dorsey can sing. And at least one of her songs – “Whether You Are the One” – is beautiful.
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