A dispatch from Gina, on the road...
The best way that I can describe the trio I've been part of, of late, The Malvinas, is from an email that I wrote to a fan in St. Louis (just one of the places we'll be playing this summer):
The Malvinas are myself and two former members of an all-female quartet out of Dallas called Chattervox. They are Lisa Markley, on guitar, who still lives in Dallas, and Beth Cahill, on mandolin and tenor guitar, who now lives in Canada. As you can imagine, these days, it's a bit of a challenge for us to get together, but somehow, we managed to put together a CD.
I met Lisa at Kerrville a couple of years ago, and Beth the day before we all played our first gig together, back in October. The CD grew from there: I think it grew out of something we were going to push at Folk Alliance to help us get some gigs. We landed a radio gig in Chicago, and that got the ball rolling to go on tour this summer. We each contributed three songs, plus there's a cover--a real stunner of a song to the Virgin Mary by a guy from New Jersey named Mike Laureanno.
In a few short months, it has come to feel like a good match: I give them my "edge" and my swamp/country roots, and they give to me their smoothness, their pop and jazz influences, their musicianship, and some incredible songs.
Realistically, it may be hard to keep it going, as we all live so far away from each other--but I can honestly say that there are few people I've enjoyed playing with as much as I've enjoyed playing with Lisa Markley and Beth Cahill.
I don't know if that tells you much about our music, except to say that it's still pretty folky. There's not a lot of production on the CD, except for one or two songs at the most. Oh yeah, the web site, for what it's worth, is www.themalvinas.com. I think there's a sound clip from our CD, as well as one from each of our solo projects.