Ellen Christi, Menage

LP 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, share the first side, and Bird With A Broken Wing, over eighteen minutes, fills the second on its own. 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 a copy of the original 1985 Soul Note LP, catalogue number SN 1097, on 140 gram vinyl: CAM Jazz, which now owns the label, describes it as original stock rediscovered in its vaults. Ducale lists it as 121097-1.