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Table manners
Hilken Mancini and Chris Colbourn open their own kitchen
BY TED DROZDOWSKI
Related Links

Listen: "Couple of Weeks" (mp3)

Hilken Mancini and Chris Colbourn's official Web site

In New England, everything starts in the kitchen, from conversations to Thanksgiving dinners to some of the best family punch-outs. Also, sometimes, albums.

Three years ago, Hilken Mancini and Chris Colbourn got together in her kitchen with their guitars. "I was looking for some advice on songs I’d written," the Fuzzy six-stringer, singer, and co-frontwoman recounts.

"I thought you were giving me advice," Colbourn good-naturedly replies.

As it turns out, they had plenty to share with each other. Colbourn, as a songwriter and the bassist in one of Boston pop’s favorite-son bands, Buffalo Tom, offered an arsenal of perspective on song structure gleaned from his own musical experience plus decades of embracing the architecture of tunes written by the likes of the Beatles and Bob Dylan. And Mancini brought an unfettered approach to, well, the table, transforming Colbourn’s song ideas in ways he hadn’t predicted by changing keys and adding ringing, gently gnarled chords and her vocal harmonies.

Just before Halloween, Mancini and Colbourn assembled around another table, at a coffeeshop across from the Honeyspot, Mancini’s hip little store on South Street in Jamaica Plain, where she spends Tuesdays through Sundays from 11 am to 7 pm offering everything from pop-up books to vintage and baby clothing to jewelry to used artifacts that included, on my visit, a ’60s-style highball glass that read "Arkansas, Land of Opportunity." They met to discuss the result of that first informal kitchen songwriting session, the plainly titled Hilken Mancini and Chris Colbourn, on the Boston-based Kimchee label. The disc comes out Tuesday, and they’ll play a CD-release show as a trio, with former Cherry 2000 drummer Mike Savage, at ZuZu in Cambridge next Thursday. Already there are plans for a European tour, possibly with Juliana Hatfield.

The friendship between Mancini and Colbourn goes back to the early ’90s, when Buffalo Tom were part of an axis of bands centered on the University of Massachusetts in Amherst that included Dinosaur Jr. and the Pixies. "I think I met Hilken for the first time when one of her bands opened for Dinosaur," Colbourn says.

Over the years, Fuzzy and Buffalo Tom played a number of shows together, but, Colbourn adds, "I think we really became friends at the Christmas parties Fuzzy used to throw. I feel like she’s my younger sister." Nevertheless, before that 2002 kitchen session, "we had never played together or talked about writing songs together. Now we know we’re a good combo. I bring my reference points and Hilken has this amazing gift for totally instinctive playing and songwriting. It’s this uniquely American kind of weirdness that comes from not being trained formally yet having the ability to create songs that are uniquely organized, like Kristin Hersh or Neil Young.

"One thing we have in common is that in our regular bands, Fuzzy and Buffalo Tom, Hilken and I are like the JV team — the reliable second string. After a couple years, you begin to see the world musically from that perspective."

"It was like that in Fuzzy," Mancini agrees. "Every time we would turn a new album in to our label, Atlantic, they’d pick a song by Chris Toppin for the single, which wasn’t surprising because Chris has one of the best voices in the world to me. She’s like Patsy Cline."

"But that’s a good thing," Colbourn says. "We don’t have big egos tied up in this. We feel really lucky to get a gig. We’re lucky Mike wants to play drums with us. We don’t take anything for granted. And people see us as underdogs, too, so they’re nice to us!"

Although Mancini and Colbourn began their collaboration by bringing in songs and fleshing them out together, the process got a bit more isolated for each of them as it rolled along. Colbourn has a day gig as a roots, rock, and jazz booking agent, is a father, and still plays with Buffalo Tom. Mancini coined the Punk Rock Aerobics franchise with Maura Jasper and plays with garage-rock outfit the Count Me Outs. And though Fuzzy are on hold, there are plans to release another CD by the group. So there were plenty of distractions.

"By the time we finished writing the songs, we were working more separately because we just had to get the album done," says Colbourn. "Ultimately it was more of a studio record than I think either of us had made before. We’d write our songs and work on them together, rehearse them once or twice, and then go right into the studio [Somerville’s Q Division] and record."

Hilken Mancini and Chris Colbourn does have a slightly schizoid charm. Colburn’s tunes, like the touching portrait of youth "Saint Agnes Eve" and the Beatles-like "Hannah," which boasts a John Lennon melody line and has an orchestrated feel, are sweet and wistful and smooth. Mancini’s tunes are a tad more angular, with light dissonances, though her voice also has traces of want and confusion that make "I Will Die" and "Wedding Cake" poignant. Touches of lap steel guitar and piano flesh out the sound, which is driven by Savage’s drums and a blend of electric and acoustic guitar from Colbourn and Mancini. Fans of both Buffalo Tom and Fuzzy will be plenty pleased.

"Now that the album is done and we’re getting ready to play some shows, we’ve been rehearsing, and the band is becoming a very powerful little trio," says Colbourn. "And," Mancini adds, "it’s really good."

HilkEn Mancini and Chris Colbourn | ZuZu, 474 Mass Ave, Cambridge | Nov 17 | 617.864.3278 x 237


Issue Date: November 11 - 17, 2005
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