The Quebe Sisters’ first performance in Milwaukee Friday, Aug. 23, at the Back Room of Colectivo was intimately appropriate for the three Texan siblings introducing their evolutionary take on Western swing to our city.
The Back Room’s close quarters enhanced the warm, sometimes goofy familial camaraderie among the trio of vocally harmonizing fiddlers. For women who have worked with many other high-profile artists, played the Grand Ole Opry, performed at the Kennedy Center and on numerous NPR and PBS shows, the Back Room will probably be the smallest venue they will ever play in Milwaukee.
Hulda, Grace and Sophia Quebe emanate youthful charm honed not only by kinship, but by playing together professionally for over 15 years. Through most of their 27 songs over two sets, double bass player Daniel Parr and acoustic guitarist Simon Stipp provided a buoyant rhythm section. They were, in turn, allowed occasional opportunities to solo, per Western swing’s roots in jazz.
If the sisters forgo the big band form of Western swing pioneers such as Bob Wills (whose “South” provided one of the night’s few instrumentals), they’re none the worse for the absence of brass, percussion and amplification. The Quebes also connected with kindred genres, including Western vocal combo the Sons of the Pioneers, a couple of whose classics the siblings adapted, and the Mills Brothers, whose “Across the Alley From the Alamo” made for one of the lighter moments in an already levity-suffused performance.
As for originals, Sophia’s “My Love, My Life, My Friend” is the sort of two-step shuffle Ray Price and his Cherokee Cowboys could have filled honkytonk dancefloors with; her “Pierce the Blue” radiates the kind of pensive melancholy too often absent from commercial country radio nowadays. Though Grace is the least talkative onstage of the sisters, her tender phrasing on sacred material such as “Wayfaring Stranger” and Willie Nelson’s secularly hymnodic “Summer of Roses” more than compensated for her reticence between songs.
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The group's forthcoming self-titled fourth album comprised about a third of their Back Room engagement, and it bodes to be a breakthrough for them. With that in mind, the Back Room's attendees may have been privy to a coziness with the Quebes that may soon be a rarity.
