GREETJE BIJMA - Sit Down Listen!(BVHaast 0803)

Dutch vocal sorceress, Greetje Bijma, has been singing in her unique way for audiences since the late seventies. She collaborated with David Moss in his Direct Sound vocal quintet in 1989, with the Willem Breuker Kollektief in 1991, toured & recorded with Marilyn Crispell & Mark Dresser in '93 & '95, worked with composer Louis Andriessen also in '93 and had a trio with Jasper van Hof & Pierre Favre in 1996.
'Sit Down Listen!' is her first solo vocal record and she wrote six of the ten songs, with covers by Abbey Lincoln, Joan Baez, Alan Laurillard and a poem by William Butler Yeats. Abbey Lincoln's touching "Throw It Away" is an appropriate opening piece with lyrics that deal with being open to things and not holding on to them. It has that eternally sad vibe that Billie Holiday evoked so well.
Greetje's own pieces stretch out her voice with an elastic depth that is in between invented language, strange vocal sounds and diverse cultures. "Birds Bath" does sound like a bird taking a bath, while "Blossom" sounds like an eastern vocalist singing a sad lullaby, she even imitates a plucked instrumental solo nicely. She takes Yeats' poem "The Sad Shepherd" and does an evocative and engaging spoken word performance, which turns into a hypnotic dijeradoo-like second half.
The title track tells a story with just sounds, sort-of native American chanting or some other unnamed culture. Greetje could pass for a cantor or some other middle-eastern singer on "Miriam's Dance II", she got that great nasal drone down so well. The Joan Baez song closes our wonderful journey with an endearing lullaby to help us into dreamland.