Ida Maria - Scandalize My Name

After some years of turbulence, Ida Maria is finally back home in Norway. She has toured the world and shared stages with some of the greatest artists in pop music. The first year after her homecoming became quite eventful. Ida Maria went to the politics. She is now a member of the council of the municipality Nesna in the north of Norway. She took part in several TV-programs, among those was Skavland, Scandinavia’s most famous talk-show. And in February she became a mother for the first time! Through her participation on a CD project raising awareness of the rights for homosexuals and lesbians to get married within the frame of the Church of Norway, she got in contact with Kirkelig Kulturverksted, and started a collaboration with the label. This became her way to make a dream come true: To turn back to the cradle of rock’n roll: American spirituals. Ida Maria found some forgotten treasures from a very special part of the American heritage. She started digging into old recordings and found songs that express the naked and distilled faith- and life experiences of the Afro americans from the 19^th and early 20^th century. Most of the songs neither the arranger and pianist Kjetil Bjerkestrand nor the producer Erik Hillestad never heard before, even though both of them have spent a lifetime recording and performing religious songs from many parts of the world. The searching for treasures resulted in the album with the somewhat suitable title “Scandalize my Name” where Ida Maria performs American spirituals, disrespectfully surrounded by Erland Dahlen’s saw and percussion, Geir Sundstøl’s various string instruments and Kjetil Bjerkestrand’s harmonium and other keyboards. These songs are all about human dignity, freedom and hope. They shine with a backdrop of misery and poverty. Their origin is slavery and exploitation, important conditions for America’s wealth and world hegemony. Some people built their power and wealth on oppressing those who performed these songs in the first place, and on the labor force of their ancestors. The sincerity and defiance they carried made them corner stones of the history of Western popular music. Today the same songs hit us with a renewed relevance contrasting a new backdrop : People from many paces break up from a systematic global injustice that contributed to create the wealth and prosperity of Europe and North America. Families and single persons make dangerous journeys towards safe havens in countries that have become rich at the cost of their ancestors. Scandalize my name is recorded in a small chapel outside of Oslo. It is released by Kirkelig Kulturverksted (KKV)