Two of the most important tours of the summer are: Alanis Morissette Brandi Carlile, are coming to Milwaukee this summer — and they’re bringing Milwaukee musicians with them.
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Cedric LeMoyne is the touring musician with Morissette who has had the longest tenure. Since 2005, the Jackson, Mississippi native, a Milwaukee resident ever since 2017, has been backing her on bass. She will join Morissette at the American Family Insurance AmphitheaterJuly 23.
Then, on Aug. 5 Brandi Carlile will be at Fiserv Forum, with Milwaukee-born, Nashville-based sisters Chauntee and Monique Ross singing backing vocals and playing violin and cello, respectively. They are well-known in the local music scene as their band. SistaStrings — which is playing a free show Aug. 1 in the Musical Mondays summer concert series in Lake Park.
“To see our dream come to fruition, of playing music with incredible people, it’s just been incredible and wild and almost still very unreal,” Monique Ross said.
Traveling the world with Alanis Morissette
LeMoyne made his first break in music when he was a bass player for the alternative-rock band Remy Zero. LeMoyne is from Birmingham, Alabama where he was born.
After the band split up, he moved from London to London. “to sort of nurse my heartbreak and started doing film and TV composing.”Ryan Murphy’s FX series featured one of his compositions as the theme song. “Nip/Tuck,” brought him to Los Angeles after it was nominated for an Emmy.
While doing session work in the city, he discovered that Alanis Morissette was leaving to join Garbage. LeMoyne was among the few bassists invited for audition and he was offered the gig in 2005.
“I’ll stay by her side as long as she’ll have me on,”LeMoyne added. “She’s sort of a global icon, so the treatment we receive, I have never experienced anything like that before, from staying in a palace in Portugal, to opening for the Rolling Stones in a giant stadium. … For a kid who grew up in the South dreaming of playing guitar for his life, getting to do that on such a stage is like a dream come true.”
“I just love the way she treats me. I love the feeling she engenders in her community,” LeMoyne continued. “She provides an environment where her musicians can contribute creatively and she invites input. … She’s in a position where she doesn’t have to take anyone’s ideas on board. She’s a brilliant creative mind, songwriter and producer. But she invites collaboration from the people that she trusts.”
Morissette’s “Jagged Little Pill” tour — a 25th anniversary celebration of her seminal album, the tour kicked off in North America last year and traveled through Europe earlier this year — was “maybe the best tour experience that I have ever had, in terms of the audiences lifting the vibration up.”
A second North American leg, which includes Morissette’s inaugural Milwaukee show since 2008 is currently underway.
“Milwaukee has so much been my cocoon away from the music industry,” said LeMoyne, who also manages the acclaimed indie-rock band Warpaint in Los Angeles. Returning home for Morissette tour “will be a clash of worlds in some way. I think I’ll find it nerve-wracking since some people know me here in a totally different context. … But it will be fun to play that stage and show my friends and family that side of me.”
How did LeMoyne land in Milwaukee?
He met Gina Barrington through a mutual friend at the Remy Zero gig in Milwaukee. This was part of a 1999 tour for Travis. They became friends and started dating while living in Los Angeles.
“We ultimately split up but stayed close friends,”LeMoyne added. “Twelve years after breaking up, we found ourselves single again and got married.”
By the time they married in 2016, Barrington had already moved back to her hometown, so LeMoyne relocated to Milwaukee, where the two also play in the band Rose of the West.
“It’s equally nourishing and important to me,”LeMoyne added. “I’m really proud of that work.”
Rose of the West is one of the Journal Sentinel’s Wisconsin Artists to Look Out For 2020. It is about to enter the mastering stage to record its second album, due to be released next January.
“I had been in L.A. for about 20 years when I moved here,”LeMoyne added. “It was a much needed move. … With Alanis, I do a lot of traveling. It’s nice to come back to a more still place.”
Nashville is looking for Ross sisters
Although the Ross sisters are at a similar stage in their careers, their journeys are almost identical to LeMoyne.
They were born and raised on Milwaukee’s north side, where as children, they performed at schools, libraries, churches and nursing homes around town in a string quartet, Sisters of Praize, with older sisters Charice Ross on violin and Rickena Johnson on viola.
The group disbanded as the sisters grew up and went away to college. After Chauntee was done with school, Monique and Chauntee returned to Milwaukee in 2014. They formed SistaStrings, and began performing and recording with Milwaukee artists such as Mike Mangione, Klassik, and Peter Mulvey.
Monique explained that it was while they were on tour in 2019 when they felt the need to move to another city. Their music teaching jobs were affected by the pandemic in the next year, so the need to move became even more urgent.
“It was Chauntee who actually set a date and said, ‘I am moving June 3rd. If I don’t set a date, it will never happen,'” Monique said. “I was like, ‘If you are leaving, I am leaving.'”
Their parents moved to Jackson, Tennessee in 2019, and the sisters settled in Nashville, so they could be close to family.
“We had no jobs lined up,”Monique mentioned that she moved to Nashville last year. “Miraculously, it worked where within a couple of weeks we were performing.”
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Before the sisters headed to Nashville, Mulvey, now based in Boston, reached out to contacts there to let them know about the Ross sisters.
That’s how Monique ended up playing in Allison Russell’s band, whom the sisters had previously met and befriended at a gig at Cafe Carpe in Fort Atkinson.
Chauntee ultimately joined Russell’s band too, but before she did, less than a month after moving to Nashville, Monique got to perform with Russell at the Newport Folk Festival in Rhode Island — and with Carlile, who joined Russell for a duet.
“Afterwards, Brandi came to see me and said, ‘I need you in our band,'” Monique said. “I said, ‘Yes, I can tour, and I also have this amazing sister,’ and gave her and her wife a card and wondered if I would hear anything from them.”
Carlile’s manager contacted her a few months later to offer both sisters the chance to join the band.
“It’s really beautiful,”Monique mentioned her love for Carlile. “We all eat together, we all sit together and have conversations. With Brandi, it is becoming another family. When you get to know each other as humans, I think it just makes the music better.”
It’s been a wild ride for the Ross sisters. They’ve played the Grammys, Elton John’s Oscars party, “Austin City Limits” and other prestigious gigs with Carlile this year, in addition to shows — “Ellen” and “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” appearances — with the fast-rising Russell.
Mulvey will release a new album on Aug. 12. “Love Is the Only Thing,”With hopes for a winter trip.
“Hearing folks’ response to the notes we’re playing has really been life-giving, honestly,”Chauntee said.
And to be able come home to play Fiserv Forum “feels like a full circle championship moment,” Chauntee added — plus the sisters are thrilled to spend some much needed downtime with friends in Milwaukee between the gigs.
“We have put in the work, we have been practicing our butts off and networking as much as we could from where we were,” Monique said. “We’re so happy we made that leap of faith.”
If you go
Who:Alanis Morissette and Garbage (Cedric Loyne will play bass to Morissette).
When:July 23rd, 7 p.m.
Where:American Family Insurance Amphitheater, Maier Festival Park 200 N. Harbor Drive
How much?:Box office: $22.50 to $175 amfamamp.com.
Who:Brandi Carlile, Lake Street Dive and Celisse (Chauntee & Monique Ross will play the strings for Carlile).
When: 7 p.m Aug. 5
Where: Fiserv Forum, 1111 N. Phillips Ave.
How much?:Box office: $61 to $131 fiservforum.com.
Who:SistaStrings With Chauntee And Monique Ross
When: 6:30 p.m. Aug. 1
Where:Lake Park Summer Stage, 2975 N. Lake Park Road
How much?: No cover.
Contact Piet at (414) 223-5162 or [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter at @pietlevyOr visit Facebook facebook.com/PietLevyMJS.
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