IN THE CLUBS

Elisa Ferrari talks about her musical origins

By Patrick Caldwell
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Elisa Ferrari has no memories of the day her family stole away from her birthplace of Buenos Aires, Argentina. She was only 2 years old when her parents decided to flee to San Diego, hoping to escape the 'Dirty War,' a period of state-sponsored violence against the Argentine citizenry between 1976 and 1983.

'My dad was a photojournalist and he was sort of on the left and things were getting really dangerous. We had friends disappearing. The government drove around in these green Ford Falcons and picked people out of their houses,' Ferrari says.

Ferrari left her place of birth behind, but its influence lingers in her music today, along with a mélange of others. The 29-year-old, who works as a curatorial assistant at the Blanton Museum of Art, has just released her debut full-length album, 'Isla de Niños.' The dark, classical-and-jazz-tinged folk is slowly winning her converts across Austin.

Ferrari grew up immersed in music; her classic rock aficionado parents exposed her to Pink Floyd, Jimi Hendrix and the Beatles alongside Brazilian pop. Her grandparents spread their love of classical music. By the time she was 5, she was convinced she wanted to be a musician, and at 10 received a cheap nylon-string guitar. She took lessons from a public access show host clad in sweat pants and tie dye and went on to study music at University of California, Berkeley and the University of Texas, where she graduated with a master's degree in ethnomusicology in 2008.

Alongside her band - bass player Ian Dicke, cellist Jen Smull and percussionist Owen Weaver - Ferrari blends folk sensibilities with the smoky appeal of jazz and the sweeping harmonics of classical music. In her willingness to craft a MySpace list of influences that includes Bach and Tom Waits, the Smiths and Stravinsky - the composer so nice she listed him twice - she's influenced by musicians she studied during a trip to northeastern Brazil.

'I loved, aesthetically, the way they lump instruments together and the rhythms that they used,' Ferrari says. 'I'd never heard music like that before. It's so folk-driven but it's also so pop music. They're influenced by Radiohead and Björk but they're also really influenced by the folk music of their region.'

Many of Ferrari's songs contain an element of darkness, a haunting lilt that will be familiar to fans of one of her biggest influences, Neko Case. The country chanteuse's 2006 album 'Fox Confessor Brings the Flood' once inspired Ferrari to write three songs in an afternoon. But that darkness also has echoes in the concept of `saudade,' a Portuguese and Galician word for a nostalgic longing for something or someone lost .

'It's a very Brazilian thing. It only exists in Portuguese. There isn't a direct translation for it, but a lot, I'd say 90 percent of Brazilian music has a lot of saudade in it,' Ferrari says. 'That's a kind of music I'm attracted to. I like sad music. I like to play with words and use them more for their beauty than for what they necessarily mean. If you looked at my lyrics written down I don't know that they'd make much sense but there's a lot of imagery that I hope conveys feelings to the audience.'

Elisa Ferrari plays 8 p.m. Saturday at Clementine Coffee Bar (2200 Manor Road. 472-9900) with the Ron Scott Practice. Free (please tip the bands).