Claudia Schmidt (Special Event)

CLAUDIA SCHMIDT likes to call herself a ?creative noisemaker.? We could start with her supple voice, which she likes to play with, trying it out on the widest variety of music from traditional folk songs to jazz standards, enjoying and mastering the musical challenges of everything she sings. A former regular on A Prairie Home Companion, she spent many of the past few years in hiding, running a bed-and-breakfast on Beaver Island in the middle of Lake Michigan (a place with a rich Irish musical tradition and strange history of its own). A MICHIGAN NATIVE, Claudia Schmidt has covered a lot of musical ground, beginning with a stirring rendition of "Tammy" at age four around a neighborhood bonfire. Then came years of choirs, a guitar, a dulcimer, and some theatre thrown into the pot. She has recorded many albums of mostly original songs, exploring folk, blues, and jazz idioms featuring her acclaimed 12 string guitar, mountain dulcimer, and incredible vocals. Her recent recordings have spanned the genres: from Dixieland gospel to a tribute to Gershwin and Ellington in celebration of their hundredth birthdays; from an album of her own original songs with Peter Ostroushko and Dean Magraw backing her up, to an album of swinging jazz with a sextet backing her.HER WILLINGNESS to cross categories has delighted many audiences, who learn to expect anything at a Schmidt concert, hymn, poem, bawdy verse, torch song, satire, and the gamut of emotions. She can weave the elements of music and stage into a program so unified and full of life that one critic has described a Claudia Schmidt concert as " . . . a lot like falling in love. You never know what's going to happen next, chances are it's going to be wonderful, every moment is burned into your memory, and you know you'll never be the same again."