“Ollabelle came together because of these musicians' love of this music, without thought of success or career or any of the other trappings of the modern professional music business. It has great value to our culture, adding new life to a tradition that is an important part of who we are. But mostly, they sound great. They sing great and they play great, and they are wonderful people,” said legendary producer and musician T-Bone Burnett of the band Ollabelle.
Named after Ola Belle Reed, a traditional North Carolina Appalachian singer born in 1916, the quintet of New York City transplants (with the exception of singer Amy Helm) all met at the Nine C club in Manhattan's East Village now called Banjo Jim's. One of its members, Tony Leone, a Connecticut native, migrated to the big city of dreams to work as a jazz drummer, and met bassist and former Indiana resident Byron Isaacs; guitarist and singer Fiona McBain, from Sydney, Australia; and keyboardist Glenn Patscha, originally from Winnipeg, Canada, who spent about 10 years living in New Orleans.
“It's just a little dive bar on the corner (Ninth Street and Avenue C) and I don't think it holds more than 75, but I think we have gotten about 120 in there,” said Ollabelle percussionist and drummer Leone. “The décor of the place when it was Nine C had 1950s and 1960s pin-up girl posters and a great jukebox with classic country, R&B and soul, and classic rock and some metal in there, too. We all used to kind of hang out there a lot. One night in particular Fiona was doing some gospel music and some time down the line they made Sundays old-time gospel music nights and it was a hot thing people were into with the ‘O Brother, Where Art Thou?' album. For me that was a way in since I was playing only jazz for a while.”
All of Ollabelle's members were playing in various groups and with each other in some way, and out of the Sunday night gospel scene emerged the group that started playing old gospel tunes without any rehearsals and began to draw a crowd. The group then got a mutual friend to record its gospel renditions free of charge in his studio.
“What we thought were going to be demos ended up being our first record after the songs were sent to T-Bone Burnett, who had his own label imprint, DMC, on Columbia Records, and took our stuff to the head guys at Columbia,” said Leone. “The first album, the material on it consisted of all new treatments of old southern gospel and delta blues songs, so a lot of people gave us this name of being a gospel band, but it actually just kind of happened.”
The group serendipitously fell into American roots music even deeper and more collectively following its self-titled traditional gospel album on the Columbia label and with its Verve Forecast Records follow-up work “Riverside Battle Songs.” On the sophomore work, Ollabelle moved out from under breathing life into new classics and composed most of the 13 songs with a few covers recorded throughout such as the Nina Simone song “See Line Woman” and Reed's “High on a Mountain.” Guitarist Larry Campbell produced the album and contributed musically, playing guitar, lap steel, pedal steel, banjo, cittern and fiddle while T-Bone Burnett and Mike Piersante mixed it. Several Ollabelle members rounded out the vintage yet fresh sounds on “Riverside Battle Songs” as Helm played the mandola (a fretted stringed instrument that is part of the same family as the mandolin), Isaacs on the Dobro (a resonator guitar) and Patscha on the accordion. The work, one of the best albums of the year, showcases the group's stunning vocal harmonies and melodious arrangements with all members taking a part in writing and singing on the songs, which they finished together as a group.
“We wanted to make it a point with this record to highlight everyone's writing,” said Leone. “The songs came to us in a variety of different ways depending on who brought it in and the reason why the band's name is attached to each song is because the way the song is on the record is the result of the effort of the entire band regardless of who started the song.”
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