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Profile: Jennifer Cutting
After years at sea, local songwriter sails home, bearing riches
by Kara Wedekind
The slim CD case with its subtle nautical designs is deceptive--it does not look like it contains a monumental work that took seven years and five trips across the Atlantic to produce. Yet, Ocean: Songs for the Night Sea Journey by Takoma Park's Jennifer Cutting is just such an album.
The sounds of the waves crashing and the first notes plucked from the Celtic harp in the opening track reveal that this CD was not just a series of rhyming words and interesting melodies to its creator.
These are the sounds of a homecoming, a return to the Washington music scene after a seven-year absence.
Ocean is an album that charts Cutting's attempt to rediscover her identity after her Washington-area, electric folk band The New St. George broke up in 1996.
Cutting had invested an entire decade of her life in the critically acclaimed The New St. George and, when that band broke up, she felt as though she herself was dissolving.
Cutting describes the period bleakly, "So, for a long time, I floundered around. I was like a bug on its back that couldn't flip over. I knew what I wasn't but I didn't know what I was."
Her crisis came when she realized that she no longer knew where her place in the music industry was.
Cutting had been a songwriter, keyboardist and an accordion player for The New St. George but she found that she did not love these things enough to perform as a soloist.
Cutting even laid down her accordion and could not pick it up again for years because the lighthearted and hopeful jigs did not feel right anymore.
"I stopped performing when The New St. George broke up...I couldn't do anything, I was melting down. So, I was forced to be quiet for a while and...figure out what I was if I wasn't all of these other things."
Cutting, an ethnomusicologist for the Library of Congress, did what any good librarian would do when unsure about something--she began to read more on the subject.
As Cutting sifted through biographies of figures in the music industry, she noticed a pattern. She was drawn to the stories of people who loved working in recording studios, people who loved the details of chord changes and setting the frame for the tune.
A profile of composer/arranger Quincy Jones was one of the biographies that captured Cutting's attention. She admitted that "you couldn't get more different in backgrounds...and yet Quincy Jones and I have everything in common. We love that minutiae."
Fundamentally, Cutting felt that she identified with composers, arrangers and producers.
It was during this period of introspection that Cutting began to slowly work on Ocean, completing about one song a year.
The transition from band member with The New St. George to a composer/arranger/musician for the Ocean album "really was a journey without distances."
In February, the Washington Area Music Awards recognized Cutting's achievement by awarding her 5 WAMMIES, and Cutting recalled, "I had [a] total sense of unreality as they called my name over and over for Best Musician of the Year, Album of the Year, Songwriter of the Year."
The neat row of blue tinted awards lined the mantle in her recording studio, crowding out the WAMMIES she had won in the past with The New St. George.
Cutting realized that, although she loved being a member of the band, her true "gift is the ability to hear things that are not there yet. I can hear, in my mind's ear, a fully realized work around a simple melody. I can hear something very simple and flesh it out in my mind until it is something quite complex and big."
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To hear Cutting talk now, it is impossible to imagine a time when she did not know that her life's passion was composing and arranging music.
In many ways, Cutting's path as a composer/arranger was, in fact, inevitable. Cutting is a conservatory-trained musician. Before getting her degree in ethnomusicology at the University of London, Cutting was a student at the College of Fine Arts at Jacksonville University, where she was exposed to medieval, renaissance and baroque music. |
Cutting's CD release Ocean: Songs for the Night Sea Journey is available at these websites: www.kinesiscd.com and www.hmtrad.com/catalog/recordings/ and www.angelfire.com/folk/canadianriver/ |
Even Cutting's family history was infused with music. Her great-grandfather was the published composer George Hoffman. Her grandfather was a conductor for NBC and a bandleader for singers like Frank Sinatra and Jimmy Durante. Leading a band was in her blood.
Although Cutting had the experience, the training and the background for composing and producing, it took many years to claim those rights.
Ultimately, Cutting does not regret the painful parts of her journey because they enabled her to begin her new life. "I had spent all these years turning to liquid inside a cocoon in order to emerge with shaky wings, at first, as the person that I am now: a bandleader, composer, arranger, producer, and I convene councils of equals. It's exactly where I am supposed to be."
Jennifer Cutting will be performing and signing CDs this month at Borders, Silver Spring. See the Voice calendar for more details.
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