Wintery Songs

• Folk
• Pop
• Singer/Songwriter

Wintery Songs in Eleventy Part Harmony is a loose collaboration of Boston-based musicians organized by veteran singer/songwriter Jennifer Kimball, who celebrate the holiday season with their delightful annual program of sacred, secular and wintery pop music rearranged, reharmonized, and often just plain turned on its head. Wielding fiddles, cellos, ukes, guitars and glockenspiels, this ensemble re-envisions the sounds of the season by reharmonizing classic songs, reinterpreting pop tunes, composing new songs for the season and bringing unknown pop gems to the lexicon of holiday-ish music.

From Sinatra to Tchaikovsky, Isaac Watts to Ana Egge, this beautifully eclectic mix of sacred and secular music inspires a reinvention of the holiday experience; one where minor keys are as familiar as major, the church has transformed into a club where all are welcome and the season’s darkness is as deep as it’s festive lights are welcoming.

Rose Polenzani

• Americana
• Folk
• Singer/Songwriter

Rose Polenzani was born in the midwest to a musical family, learning harmony at her parents’ knee, hiding out under the family piano; she was always surrounded by music.

She began writing songs in college, and left school to start her life as a singer-songwriter. She was discovered by Amy Ray of the Indigo Girls, signed to Ray’s Daemon Records for two releases, and spent a decade touring the US, supporting such acts as the Indigo Girls, Over the Rhine, Joan Baez, David Gray, and Freedy Johnston. Though she started as a solo act, collaboration has become the driving force behind her songwriting, as evidenced by her recent work in Wintery Songs in Eleventy Part Harmony, the Sub Rosa collective, and her lush, live-in-studio recordings “The Rabbit” (2011) and “When the River Meets the Sea” (2006).

Jennifer Kimball

• Folk
• Singer/Songwriter

Boston-based singer/songwriter and harmony aerialist, Jennifer Kimball is releasing Avocet, her first solo record in ten years. Kimball grew up in a musical family and began singing professionally in 1983 with college classmate, Jonatha Brooke. ‘Jonatha and Jennifer’ evolved into national touring act The Story and signed with Elektra, releasing two critically-acclaimed albums, Grace in Gravity (1991) and Angel in the House (1993).

Jennifer left The Story in 1994 to pursue a career as a freelance harmony singer and solo artist.  In 1998 she signed with PolyGram and released her first solo record Veering from the Wave about which The Washington Post wrote “what makes these songs [and their lush-quirky chamber-pop arrangements] so impressive… is the elegant melodies and harmonies, which capture the loneliness and longing that blossom in the wake of separation.”

In the early 2000s, Jennifer lost her mother, got married and had a son, hanging up her touring days in the process. Since then, her musical life has revolved around a vibrant local music scene in Cambridge/Somerville where she continues to share her compelling harmonies and melodic ideas with a slew of local projects, often collaborating with Rose Polenzani, Duke Levine, Rose Cousins, Laura Cortese, Kris Delmhorst, Session Americana, Alastair Moock, Peter Mulvey and Chandler Travis. She continues to write songs, teaches harmony singing, and runs a holiday ensemble called Wintery Songs in Eleventy Part Harmony.  Alec Spiegelman (Pokey Lafarge, Cuddle Magic) has produced an album that is surprising, poignant and beautiful, a splendid chamber-pop over and through which floats the unadorned and honest voice of a truly literate songwriter, a voice which conveys warmth without affect, the voice of Jennifer Kimball.