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Hendrix in Peggy Lee’s Dress: The Lascivious Biddies at the Hayes Center July 21

Story by Bernadette Cahill The Lascivious Biddies will perform at the Hayes Performing Arts Center on Monday, July 21.

Music lovers who want to hear something they can’t buy on CD need to head to the Monday, July 21, show at the Hayes Performing Arts Center in Blowing Rock. That night, The Lascivious Biddies will feature Jimi Hendrix’s “Fire.” It’s a performance-only song because the quartet does it in a unique style and the Hendrix estate is touchy about recordings with even minor changes to his songs.
“It’s Hendrix in Peggy Lee’s dress,” said bass player Saskia Lane in a telephone interview, using a metaphor to describe what really needs to be experienced.
Referring again to dress, Lane added that if anyone feels the need to put an extra sparkle on his/her hair for the show she encourages them “to go right ahead.”
The quartet enjoys such gregariousness, and when performers mingle and meet with the audience at the end, they always compliment the perpetrators.
The interpretation of Hendrix and the love of funky clothes, including high heels—“We’ve got songs about shoes,” said Lane—are just a couple of the things that make this all-female quartet a must-see.

The memorable starts with that name: an odd mixture of city and country, easy folksiness and pushy sexual liberation that piques the curiosity. Lead vocalist, pianist and melodica player Deirdre Rodman Struck, while on holiday in Canada, just exclaimed one day she’d always wanted to be in a group called The Lascivious Biddies, and the quartet grew from there.

“We think of it in an ironic way,” said Lane.

Together now nearly eight years, the four resisted for about five of those years the pressure to drop the “lascivious” bit because, critics said, people wouldn’t know how to pronounce it or what it meant.

“We stuck to our guns,” said Lane. “We are educating the world.”

Bassist Lane, Ila Cantor and Lee Ann Westover are Struck’s “partners in crime,” so to speak, producing unusual renditions of old and newer favorites, including some country tunes.

“The band started as a cover band,” said Lane, “and took off from there. We enjoy doing covers. It’s fun to rearrange and invent, add another spin or voice. It allows the audience to come in in a very familiar way.”

The four are now writing more of their own songs while their modern jazz-based approach to music blends jazz, pop and cabaret with four-part harmonies, amazing energy, outrageous humor and expert musicianship.

Struck has a master’s degree in jazz, played for the Big Apple Circus, and has collaborated with such notables as Roy Nathanson, Mike Viola, Debbie Harry and Elvis Costello. She and lead vocalist Westover—a specialist in Italian literature and a regularly published writer—started off trying to create a Go-Gos cover band.

Guitarist/vocalist Cantor studied the guitar in New York and Barcelona with John Scofield and composer Guillermo Klein and also leads her own jazz trio, The Trapezoids. Lane, also a vocalist, began playing violin, later moved to double bass and has a master’s from Juilliard. Lane also performs with the children’s music hit Dan Zanes & Friends, and sometimes shares the stage with Natalie Merchant, Jay-Z, Beyoncé and Enya.

The group’s style defies categorization. They searched to find a genre, Lane said, and eventually came up with “cocktail pop” to describe “a night out with fun, flair and a pop aesthetic. It’s jazz based and takes off from there. It’s post- post-modern. It steps outside itself often. It’s so freeing as a musician. There are no limits. It reflects our spirit.”

Reflecting that free spirit, all four women will step up to the microphone at some time during the evening, said Lane.

They are also introducing new colors and textures into their music, with Struck learning the glockenspiel and Lane moving from the double bass to the ukulele.
The July 21 performance will also include the old Marilyn Monroe favorite, “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” that The Lascivious Biddies started performing after recording for a collection of Broadway songs.

“It was like a hammer over the head,” said Lane, “We should have been doing the song for years.”

The song has now become a fan favorite.

For further information, phone the Hayes Center at 828-295-9627

Want To Go?

Date: Monday, July 21
Time: 7:30 p.m.
Location: Hayes Performing Arts Center, 152 Jamie Fort Road (off Hwy 321), Blowing Rock
Cost: $26 adults/$20 students