Ellen Christi, Menage

CD version. Live At Irving Plaza documents a set by the singer Ellen Christi and her group Menage at the New York venue on June 28, 1984, during that year's Kool Jazz Festival. Two voices lead the band, Christi and Lisa Sokolov, over pianist Rahn Burton, bassist William Parker and drummer Tom Bruno. Christi, born in Chicago in 1958, studied for four years with Jaki Byard in New York and took vocal technique and movement from Jeanne Lee. She was also a co-founder of the New York City Artists' Collective, whose publishing arm holds the three compositions here, all her own.

The concert was produced by Verna Gillis and recorded by Lefferts Brown. Christi mixed the tapes with Giancarlo Barigozzi at Barigozzi Studio in Milan on November 23, 1984, and Giovanni Bonandrini produced the album for Soul Note, with liner notes by Lee Jeske. The programme is three long pieces: Awakening and Frightened Of Feeling, about ten and eleven minutes, then Bird With A Broken Wing, which runs past eighteen minutes and closes the set. The jazz.com encyclopedia lists Parker, Sokolov and Bruno among the musicians Christi has worked with over the years, together with Andrew Cyrille, Reggie Workman, Ed Blackwell and Rashied Ali, and notes that she also founded her own label, Network Records.

This is the Soul Note CD 121097-2, which Discogs lists as a reissue of the album first released on LP in 1985 as SN 1097.