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You’d never know that jazz is America’s least popular musical
genre based on the number of recent releases that have crossed my desk. Here
are four:
The most intriguing of the lot is from a young singer named Violette. To say her background is
eclectic is an understatement. She was born in Paris and eventually studied at
the Parisian Academy, though she spent most of her youth on Ars-en-Ré, a small
island about 5 miles offshore in the Poitou region of France. Then she came to
Boston’s Berklee College of Music, and now lives in Brooklyn. Her self-produced
CD Falling
Strong is a bilingual effort produced by Brian Bacchus, who also
produces Nora Jones. Like Jones, Violette isn’t terribly concerned about
genres. She’s in the chanteuse tradition of jazz, but her inspirations include
everyone from Edith Piaf and Jacques Brel to Ella Fitzgerald and Michael
Jackson. Among her dozen original compositions are ones that blur pop/jazz
borders (“All My Life,” “I Heart New York”), those with Fitzgerald-like heavy
staccato (“Falling Strong”), small combo numbers (“Coming to You”), and those
with Brel-like fragility (“Annabelle”). It’s also an album of two distinct
moods. When Violette sings in English she’s competent and confident, but when
she switches to French, the emotions pop through with more drama. You can hear
this in the swingy “Moi Pour Moi,” the catchy “Envol,” and the bouncy “Musique
d’Amérique.” The English pieces are bon, but the French are trés bon.
I’ll
call Concetta Abbate a jazz artist
simply because she plays in jazz venues, but there really isn’t any clean
category for her Falling in Time (Waterbug). She’s a classically trained
violinist, but she calls this14-track selection “pocket-sized songs,” which is
both intriguing and enigmatic—like her music. There’s nothing on this album
longer than 4 minutes and several are two or shorter. In addition to her
violin, Abbate also performs on harp, charrango,
homemade box percussion, and glockenspiel. Guests add viola, cello, guitar,
piano, bass, percussion, and trumpet. Her songs are frequently poetic and
sometimes downright weird. I can’t promise you’ll love everything on this CD,
but you’re unlikely to be bored!
Abbate
gives us a Latin flair, but Gino Sitson
is a voice of Africa (Cameroon). More precisely, Africa is among his voices. His VoiStrings
(Buda Records 4707155) is aptly named and Sitson’s is a four-octave voice that
can be as smooth as burnished wood or as taut as a violin string tuned to its
breaking point. The band behind him is generally centered on piano, though
double bass, percussion, cello, and viola help construct polyphonous
arrangements that serve whatever Sitson pulls from his bulging bag of vocaltricks: scat, falsetto, wails, wounded cries…. Some of the tracks border on
experimental, others pulse with African soul, and along the way we hear
influences from gospel, the blues, and maybe some Papa Wemba and Bobby
McFerrin.
Members
of the rock band Steely Dan love the songs of jazzman Bill Gable and his album No Straight Lines (Autograph 502) explains why. As the
title suggests, this is an album of departures and curves. It’s laid-back, but
you name it and Gable weaves it into a song for his trademark counter-tenor
voice: flamenco, pop, world jazz, Caribbean influences…. His lyrics don’t mince either:
“Everybody sees/what they want to see/Every sinner finds his god/At the end of
the day/no one comes to show us the way/No one gives a nod or a hand/judgment
isn’t rendered/Bodies lie in state/overwhelmed by fate.”
Rob Weir
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