Baby Dee is what you might call a late bloomer. When she released her first LP, Little Window, she was already in her late forties, and her biography read like a Tom Waits song. According to a story she told NPR, she fell in love with the harp at age four after discovering the one inside an upright piano during a neighborhood piano-smashing party. Later, she often played harp in Central Park while wearing a bear costume. She had stints as a church organist and a Coney Island sideshow. Her music is an equally paradoxical blend of spiritual uplift and tin-megaphone banter.
The transition from street artist to professional has been gradual. By 2008's Safe Inside the Day, she'd learned how to make a commercial album, and her signature harp and accordion gave way to grand piano-- a more typical and versatile foundation. With her remarkable life experience now paired with recording practice, Baby Dee has made her best album yet just a couple of years shy of her 60th birthday. Idiosyncratic but ruggedly classic, Regifted Light is old-fashioned art music with a sheen of downtown grit. Dee caresses and pounds producer Andrew WK's Steinway D to life with the lyrical bluster of Gershwin and the nimble thematic development of Sondheim. It's a welcome change of pace from the post-minimalism that's rampant in indie piano music.
Opening instrumental "Cowboys With Cowboy Hat Hair" establishes the album's harmonic environment, making this more of a song cycle than a collection of individual pieces. Over martial snares, Dee works a theme from the C Minor scale-- light on the sharps as to lean it toward bright C Major-- up and down the keyboard. The theme rolls back and forth on itself and fractures across different octaves in odd places so that lone high notes ring out ornamentally. Regifted Light never strays too far from this tonal vicinity, which creates a unified wistfulness that Dee articulates in every shade from happy to sad. The diversity arises from Dee's inspired handling of the shallow pool of intervals-- you never know which way the themes will veer next, into upper-register dances or lower-register thunder-- and is abetted by conversational accompaniment for bassoon, cello, and glockenspiel.
Dee has an incredible voice that has drawn unavoidable comparisons to Antony Hegarty's. In fact, it is more unusual than Antony's, and more inclined toward musical theater. A little of it goes a long way, which is why it works so well appearing on just four of the 12 songs here. The scarcity gives it an outsized, mythic quality. Dee suddenly appears, utters wisdom or metaphysical fables, and vanishes into the music again. Within a single line, her voice flickers through not just different emotions, but personalities.
"The moon is my redeemer/ The moon is my befriending Jesus," Dee drawls on the title track, merging pagan and monotheistic traditions into a sense of human tenderness that overarches eons. The notion that with each "regifting" of the light, its "gentleness increases" could sound forced and trite in a different context, but in Dee's hands it feels at-ease and hard-won. "Brother Slug and Sister Snail" is a Joanna Newsom-like animal allegory where Jesus sings from the cross, "I am a worm and not... a... MAN!" But nobody hears him. The narrative topology is strange, but not for strangeness' sake: The elegant music bends it toward profundity.
Baby Dee tends to get written about with words like "flamboyant" and "campy," and "The Pie Song" demonstrates why: Dee bashes out mad-composer chords while demanding pie with the indefinable undercurrent of menace minted by the Frogs. While "The Pie Song" is not representative of Regifted Light, those who want to hear the album as camp will do so, despite the fact that Dee's theatrics have been scaled back, and at any rate are not campy but piercingly sincere. The camp pigeonhole is always difficult for transgender artists to avoid in the mainstream. But Dee is simply a musician making very earnest art about a very unusual life. Regifted Light doesn't seem built to shock or cajole, but to connect with all sorts of people, and to last.
