Don’t call vocalist Tamar Korn a songbird or, heaven forbid, a singer; those terms are far too reductive. More accurately she’s a free flying “animal-spirit”; a buoyant, airborne force of nature; a songbird totem perhaps, but surely a vocal instrumentalist.
To experience her singing is to be swept into the air with her but without a net; finding yourself navigating updrafts and rhythmic curves, familiar and flowing one minute, then suddenly hitting gloriously destabilizing eddies and spirals, before returning to secure flight; and then finally delivering you happily to your secure perch. A one-woman Harlem Globe Trotter; three-fourths trapeze artist, one eighth clown and one eighth revival tent minister—employing vernacular old-world vaudeville songs and American Standards (when not doing her own originals) as her vehicle to convey big-story feelings and ideas. If nothing else, she’s an idiosyncratic artist-performer!
After first hearing Tamar around 2013 in New York, I recall imagining her as one of the characters in Picasso’s flamboyant, wildly cubist paintings, “Three Musicians.” I speculated (metaphorically) how, as a child, she must have freely and proudly played with her crayons in and outside of the lines of her coloring books! I have subsequently learned she was rear
