CD Music
Esperanza Spalding: "Chamber Music Society"
August 2010
Esperanza Spalding’s Music Successfully Channels Exciting New Crossover Directions
Heads Up HUI-31910-2
Format: CD
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Young Esperanza Spalding is a triple-threat artist. She’s an accomplished acoustic bass player, a virtuoso jazz singer, and an adept songwriter. And on this exciting and appealing CD, she often displays all three of her talents at once. The album’s basic idea was to combine a jazz trio (Spalding, pianist Leo Genovese, and drummer Terri Lyne Carrington) with a string trio made up of violinist Entcho Todorov, violist Lois Martin, and cellist David Eggar. The six players are augmented from time to time with another percussionist, as well as guitar and backing vocals. The result is a new direction for jazz that should also please listeners who like classical, folk, or world music.
The music is kaleidoscopic -- essential and alive, lush and lean, sweet and sultry, and simple and complex. Spalding brings new life to “Wild Is the Wind” and “Inútil Paisagem” by going to the heart of each piece, separating the elements and reweaving them in her distinctive and seductive style. Her voice can be simple and sweet (“Little Fly”) or insistent and cutting (“Really Very Small”). It’s an instrument that seems to have no restrictions of range or timbre, and it does exactly what she wants it to do. Though every track exhibits emotion and warmth, there’s always a consummate intellectual guidance system calling the shots. Spalding’s backup musicians sound more like collaborators who complement and expand her verve rather than taking a back seat, and the rich, full, and singularly focused close-up recorded sound makes everything clear to the listener’s ear.
Spalding is not yet 30, and she’s already on a course to become one of the hallowed greats of jazz. Get the CD and hitch a ride.
Be sure to listen to: The introduction to “Winter Sun” is delicately layered for Spalding’s bass, the piano, the string trio, and wordless backing voices. Superb engineering gives full support to make this track a moment of beauty and musical magic.
. . . Rad Bennett
radb@soundstagenetwork.com
John Escreet: "Don't Fight the Inevitable"
June 2010
Jazz Tone Poems of Searing Intensity Sizzle on John Escreet's Second CD
Mythology Records MR0007
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Escreet's music is inventive, powerful, and even frightening at times. Throw in his virtuoso playing and it seems that the overused adjective awesome has found a worthwhile use. His backup band, the John Escreet Project, comprises musicians (David Binney on alto saxophone/electronics, Ambrose Akinmusire on trumpet, Matt Brewer on double bass, and Nasheet Waits on drums) who keep up with him not as background but as co-conspirators, and the ensemble's hair-raising virtuosity is breathtaking.
There's a sixth voice in "Charlie in the Parker," as a recording of Parker's spoken voice has been woven into the track: "Music is basically harmony, melody, and rhythm; people can be descriptive in all kinds of ways." Parker was instrumental in changing the face of jazz, and his inclusion here is a tribute to innovation and an affirmation that Escreet will keep its torch burning. The recorded sound is full and appropriately reverberant without losing any detail, and that's no small accomplishment since there are a so many subtleties here that could easily get lost in the often cacophonous mix.
Be sure to listen to: The striding opening and chord progressions of the first cut, "Civilization on Trial," which might remind the astute listener a bit of John Carpenter's Halloween score. That reference is quickly banished by an insistent rhythmic motif but then reappears under a new guise. For once the opening track on an album really sounds like a curtain raiser.
. . . Rad Bennett
radb@soundstagenetwork.com
