Here’s a little secret: When Noise Pop takes over the city for two weeks from mid-February to early March, it’s not about the big indie rock acts or the trending buzz bands of the current moment. Not even—and if you read my column, you know I love jazz. But it’s not that or the gazillion electronic music artists I’m looking for each year at this festival. I want to see to which local artists Noise Pop has chosen to give national exposure. The whole world comes to the Bay Area for a couple of weeks with a similar question: OK Cloud City, who’s next?
To answer that for myself, I visit venues that are very artist-friendly. The Joe Henderson Lab at SFJAZZ is one of the best spots for live music in the city—it can make a Tuesday brunch sound and feel like a Friday night club, where the DJ is so good, your bubbly water hits like a cocktail you need to take out a personal loan to pay for.
Dani Offline is a songwriter, composer, producer, multi-instrumentalist, and vocalist. But at the two Sunday night performances I witnessed in February, this budding young artist—a transplant from Birmingham, Alabama who came to the Bay for graduate studies at UC Berkeley—was working those vibe merchant energies.
Her lyrics maneuver through real-world stuff, like moving the furniture around in her apartment, getting her life sorted, and losing the dude—all at once. Those musings are delivering through the language of jazz, blues, and soul, but very much with a nouveau hip-hop aesthetic approach. You can always tell if a performer is authentic by the way their band reacts to a performance, and she had a very tight assembly of young musicians in stitches. They were cracking up at the 7 and 8:30pm shows, with Dani rotating the jokes like a pro, while the band, audience, and numerous well-wishers kept time. Meaning, she wasn’t faking a thing.
You can hear tradition in her arrangements. Roberta Flack, Anita Baker, Aretha Franklin, Nona Hendryx, Whitney Houston, Sade, Jill Scott, Minnie Riperton, Chaka Khan, Erykah Badu, Lauryn Hill, Patti Austin, even Phoebe Snow all flow like a waterfall in her sound. Each song Dani Online performs on stage reflects that rizz factor. She is next.
So Noise Pop, invite her back. Here is your Bay Area star worth following, and we’re tracking that ascent.
