|
|
ID: FHR10 CDs: 1 Type: CD |
Kolektion: JazzRecorded and mastered by Nick Taylor, Porcupine Studios.
With Special guest - Digby Fairweather - Trumpet
One of the leading jazz vocalists in the UK, Wendy Nieper is a very versatile, sophisticated jazz vocalist and a gifted scat singer. Her rich vocal colors are complemented by wonderful phrasing and great musicality. Her wide experience as a singer includes being a member of the Swingle Singers with whom she recorded five albums. She has appeared on numerous albums both as a classical and jazz singer and has toured extensively around the globe. On this album, Nieper is accompanied by a great band including the talented composer/ pianist Roland Perrin and the jazz legend Digby Fairweather. First Flight is an explosive mix of styles from Cuban to jazz and pop to funk. If you like Diana Krall, Stacey Kent, Claire Martin then we are sure you will love First Flight.
Booklet notes
When you break open the packaging of a new album and put it into the CD player, do you always start at the beginning? Maybe it is years of building radio programmes and reviewing CDs, but I tend to make for the standards first. Of course it is interesting to hear completely new music - and there’s plenty of it on offer here - but I confess to having started listening to this album with Good Bait and Ponciana. The reasoning goes that you’ll quickly get the measure of a singer and her accompanists according to how they tackle familiar material.
I wasn’t more than half a bar into Good Bait when my ears pricked up. Here was Tadd Dameron’s epitome of a four-four swing theme transferred into a dancing 6/8 rhythm. After a quick zip through the vocalise of the verse, a nice scat chorus is followed by some deft unison between voice and piano. Meanwhile, Ponciana escapes nicely from the shadow of Ahmad Jamal, and becomes a fresh-sounding piece, with some inventive vocal harmonies on the introductory theme and a sweetly sung chorus that steers a neat course between the gauche ingénue qualities of an Astrud Gilberto and the more knowing approach of a Julie London. Clearly Wendy Nieper is a singer who is prepared to tackle familiar material with originality, and she is paced every step of the way by pianist and, on several tracks, composer, Roland Perrin.
I knew Roland’s work from the Blue Planet Orchestra, and as a pianist who had worked with many visiting stars, especially the South Africans in exile who had congregated around the Brotherhood of Breath. I had not realised that like Wendy Nieper, he had a foot, if not an entire leg, in the classical world as well.
For pianists, there are plenty of precedents for straddling the classical and jazz worlds. Fats Waller and James P. Johnson were both accomplished classical players, as was Art Tatum. Bud Powell recorded his personal take on J. S. Bach, and more recently both Chick Corea and Keith Jarrett have moved effectively between the worlds of the Mozartian concert hall and the jazz club. It is less usual for a singer to make a reputation in both the jazz and classical worlds.
Wendy Nieper, however, is someone who has, with duo recordings of Chopin, Canteloube, Sondheim and Bernstein to her credit.
“I focussed on classical singing first,” she told me, “because it demands that you train your voice before you reach a certain age. Classical singing involves a completely different technique from jazz, because you have to develop a core sound, and aim for very clear pronunciation. I’ve always stressed that what I do involves two very different voices. The classical voice is designed to project. It’s very loud, and has a brilliance and ring to it. My jazz voice, on the other hand, is very quiet and intimate, and it plays on things that the microphone gives you. It can be breathy; you can distort your vowel sounds for effect, and be more casual about your consonants. It comes from a different place physically, so you have to change your vocal position.”
The opening track, Blower’s Daughter makes this point perfectly, with Wendy caressing the lyric in a manner a classical singer could not contemplate. Yet the purity of her sound and her use of different registers is a clue to the rigorous training she has undergone, and her mastery of vocal technique. Originally, she had intended to give the first chorus of Solomente a classical treatment, projecting her soprano voice over Perrin’s deft classically inspired rhythmic figures. But it sounded wrong, and instead she ended up with the humming chorus that introduces Pablo Neruda’s Spanish lyrics. The closest she comes to revealing her classical voice is in the link between these and the English version of what she describes as a “landscape song”.
Landscape is important to Wendy in her own song writing. In Roland Perrin, whom she met at a house party she threw a while ago, she has found a collaborator who shares her love of terrain, and of experiment. She says. “I love singing descriptive lyrics like in Empty Beach (a song about someone lost in thought on a seashore) where it runs ‘Clouds drift high in a vast rose sky, time dissolves in a sea bird’s cry’ or ‘Holding on to a silk thin thread, of images forming then quickly shed’. We experimented with the music so that in that same song we do a contrary motion scale (piano going up, voice going down) just before the words ‘Can Echo’ which I then echo in a different key!” From our conversation, I was intrigued to learn that Digby Fairweather’s Harmon muted trumpet here is representing a seagull!
Tree also explores landscape themes, although Wendy confesses this song has been with her a long time, saying, “The rhythmic theme came from a ditty that I wrote as a kid. And Roland kindly made it into something real and quite different.” Their partnership nods in the direction of the jazz tradition as well, on the quirky Monk-ish What’ll it be?, which was written about a waitress in a restaurant where Wendy once worked in Richmond, Surrey.
Overall, the album is a highly successful blend of new takes on old material, and new takes on new material. Although she and Roland had met and discussed the music before the session, Wendy stresses that it was recorded in the age-old manner of jazz records, where four musicians who had not recorded together before arrived on the day and played music that was new to all of them. Each take was an adventure, and the same applied to the second day of recording when Helder Pack replaced Guy Silk for another voyage into the unknown. And as a bonus, Wendy adds quite a few improvised sections at the end of the songs, scatting or humming as an instrumentalist, playing off her fellow musicians, and turning the entire album into a genuine musical conversation, which like all discourses, runs deep and shallow, and hot and cold, and fast and slow, as it develops.
© 2011 Alyn Shipton (Jazz critic, The Times) |
15.00 eur Buy |
|
ID: FHR08 CDs: 1 Type: CD |
Subkolektion: Saxophone Genres: Jazz/Avant Garde & Free Jazz, R&B/Funk
“All in all this music has something everyone will love” Rolling Stone
Recorded in 1978, ‘Fat Doggie’ is a genre-defying fusion of jazz, funk, disco, soul and Latin. Solid rhythm section, tight horns, great tunes - imagine Average White Band, Santana, James Brown, Albert Ayler, & Tower of Power all on one album! The Greg Alper Band featured the finest jazz players in New York, including Richie Morales (Spyro Gyra, Brecker Bros), Chuck Loeb (Bob James, Fourplay) & Ray Anderson (Best Trombonist: Down Beat magazine critics poll 1987-91). The disco infused funk opening cut Hole in Your Pocket, was a dance floor classic. The combustible Give it Up is a scorching tightly-syncopated funk workout that wouldn’t sound out of place on a vintage Tower of Power album. The mellower mid-paced Latin grooved bonus track Many Moods with exquisite horn parts, lit by celestial shimmering guitar accompaniment. The original release elicited positive press reviews including Rolling Stone which said “...all in all this music has something that everyone will love” as well as Billboard’s “Top Album Picks”. In recent years, the hard-to-find ‘Fat Doggie’ album has become something of a cult collectable with groove spotters, DJs and jazz-funk disciples the world over. Remastered at Abbey Road Studios using the original source tapes, ‘Fat Doggie’ has once again been unleashed from the kennel! |
15.00 eur Buy |
|
ID: NBR02 CDs: 1 Type: CD |
Subkolektion: Piano and Double-bass Recorded at mu-rec studio, Milano on 13/14 September 2004.
Artwork (front cover reproduced above) by Alessandro Flocco. |
15.00 eur Buy |
|
ID: NBR07 CDs: 1 Type: CD |
Subkolektion: Saxophone |
15.00 eur Buy |
|
ID: SKMR034 CDs: 1 Type: CD |
Kolektion: JazzSubkolektion: Ethno Ethno-jazz, drum-n-bass, Russia
"eto_x pulls things not commonly found with one another together. Thus the bandґs miscegenation of drumґn bass, ethnic music and jazz and the birth of their own musical form. The Berliner band achieves this musical melding with lightness and ease. The recipe for success lies in the fact that professional musicians are steeped in authentic russian musical folklore while belonging to the youngest generation of Berlin artists and modern western culture."
Michael Damm / International FilmFestival Cottbus |
15.00 eur Buy |
|
ID: SKMR042 CDs: 1 Type: CD |
Kolektion: JazzSubkolektion: Ethno Trigon is the name of a folk-jazz band from Moldova.
Guest musician: Valeriu Cascaval, dulcimer
Ethno Jazz group Trigon was born in 1992 owing to desire to play music for the soul, which one is unexpected for musicians has brought to them the European grade already in 1994, thanking to the award of the French Academy of arts "Charles Cros" for debut CD - "The Moldovan wedding in jazz". "Trigon's style encompasses elements of folk, jazz, rock and symphonic music. Brilliant improvisations and a keen understanding of musical forms characterize their jazz compositions. Trigon is undoubtedly a phenomenon in modern jazz music in its highest intellectual expression" L.Osipova, Vice-president of the Russian Composers Union
"The words told to address of group oblige Trigon to correspond to this presentation during the years, always to be in creative looking up experimenting with ethno music and jazz. For group was possible to construct monumental synthesis between Rumanian and Balkans melodies and cosmopolitan jazz freedom."Virgil Mihaiu, Jazz & Rock |
15.00 eur Buy |
|
ID: NBR04 CDs: 1 Type: CD |
Subkolektion: Piano |
15.00 eur Buy |
|
ID: NBR01 CDs: 1 Type: CD |
Kolektion: JazzHamid Drake (drums, voice)
Paolo Angeli (Sardinian prepared guitar, voice)
Recorded live at Ai confini tra Sardegna e Jazz XIX, Sant’Anna Arresi on 4 September 2004. |
15.00 eur Buy |
|
ID: CP024 CDs: 1 Type: CD |
Kolektion: JazzSubkolektion: Orchester |
15.00 eur Temporarily out of stock |
|
|