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Danielia Cotton (Friday 4:40 p.m. BMI Stage)
New Jersey’s Danielia Cotton has the sort of voice for which the phrase “force of nature” was coined. Perhaps she comes by it honestly —- her mother was a jazz singer and her aunts sang in church —- but the instrument into which she has honed that natural gift is uniquely hers.
A hard-rock devotee in her youth, Cotton came on the scene in 2005 with her debut full-length album, “Small White Town.” Not having heard the album, I don’t know if it accurately captures her chops. But onstage, she shows a gift for bringing a tune from a rolling simmer to a full boil and then using her powerful but nuanced voice to raise the temperature into blowtorch territory.
Her kickoff song, “Devil In Disguise,” was all crunch, crush and yowl. But as her set progressed, her control over that big voice became apparent. “Found Another” was a bouncy, don’t-let-the-door-hit-ya kiss-off, while “It’s Only Life” (“The first song I ever heard myself sing on the radio,” she said), with its stoic, sing-along title line and unvarnished look at hard times, had “hit single” written all over it.
After “Try” (“stanky, nasty rock,” she described it) and the gospel-flavored “Take My Heart,” a new song, “Bang the Drum,” revealed another aspect of Cotton’s repertoire: a gift for the U2-style Big Anthem.
After all of that, her ebullient cover of AC/DC’s “Back In Black” — even conducted at a volume that knocked the sausages off the sticks at the food court across the grounds — was almost anticlimactic. High cotton, indeed.
(Jay Janner AMERICAN-STATESMAN)
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By Don
September 16, 2006 11:51 AM | Link to this
Wow! What a voice, and what a backup band! Only a couple of hundred people were on hand for her set and, I couldn’t believe people were walking by without stopping and listening.