When: 7.30pm on Saturday 24 May 2025
Where: Hallé at St Michael’s, 36-38 George Leigh Street, Ancoats, Manchester M4 5DG
We’re excited to be welcoming Sam Amidon back – this time, to St Michael’s – with special guest Yoshika Colwell.
When Sam Amidon flew to Los Angeles late in the winter of 2024 to collaborate with Sam Gendel, he had a deceptively complex plan for their session: that is, he had no real plan at all. Amidon and Gendel had long been two members of a mutual admiration society. When Amidon first saw Gendel play at his now-fabled residency at the Hollywood Italian restaurant Pace years earlier, he was wowed by Gendel’s open-ended enthusiasm and stylistic vim, plus charmed by his invitation to sit in on violin, though he didn’t know much about making ‘jazz’. Gendel, too, had been an ardent fan of Amidon’s voice and flexibility since seeing him on YouTube nearly two decades ago. Gendel even joined Amidon and the great Milford Graves for the 12-minute finale of 2017’s The Following Mountain. But what, exactly, were the New England folk musician now living in England and the pedal-hopping polyglot saxophonist going to do for the better part of a week in Gendel’s Venice home, in his ad hoc dining room studio? Neither exactly knew.
Amidon offered up two ideas. First, they could simply play, pursuing whatever ideas felt good as they jammed. Or, perhaps, they could tinker with a batch of interpretations Amidon had been building, a loose set of somewhat familiar tunes — Yoko Ono’s Ask the Elephant, Lou Reed’s Big Sky, the rapturous hymn Old Churchyard, the standard English shanty Golden Willow Tree. Gendel’s eyes and imagination lit up with the latter idea, or at the chance to help Amidon in his decades-long quest to recontextualise what it means to sing a folk song or make folk music. When Amidon left Los Angeles just days later, the bulk of Salt River – his Gendel-produced debut for River Lea Recordings / Rough Trade and a radical reintroduction to the possibilities of Sam Amidon’s music – was done.
Special guest is Yoshika Colwell. Hailing from the South East of England, Yoshika has been writing and gigging solo across the UK since she started making music in earnest in 2017 – including supporting Luke Sital-Singh, Gotts Street Park, Fionn Regan and Bears Den. Last Spring, Yoshika released her debut EP There’s A Time, which saw support from BBC 6 Music, The Line of Best Fit, Holler, Clash and The New Cue to name a few.
A captivating talent and vital new voice in the great canon of English folk music, Yoshika’s songs are often deeply personal and concerned with attempting to understand the self and others, time, nature and mortality. A life-long Joni Mitchell fan she also takes inspiration from a wide mix of artists from Gillian Welch to Linda Perhacs and John Prine to Talk Talk.
This is a 14+ show. Under 16s must be accompanied by an adult.
This is a co-promotion with Please Please You.
Attend on: Facebook