Kenny Wheeler, Norma Winstone & London Vocal Project - Mirrors

Styles: Jazz, Post-Bop
Year: 2013
File: MP3@320K/s
Time: 69:40
Size: 160,0 MB
Art: Front

(5:21)  1. Humpty Dumpty
(3:58)  2. The Broken Heart
(5:36)  3. The Lover Mourns
(7:48)  4. Black March
(8:59)  5. Through the Looking Glass
(3:59)  6. The Hat
(5:57)  7. Breughel
(8:37)  8. Tweedledum
(6:16)  9. The Bereaved Swan
(8:42) 10. The Deathly Child
(4:22) 11. My Soul

That trumpeter/flugelhornist/composer Kenny Wheeler is challenging himself at 80 is surely inspirational. Mirrors represents his first recording where poems provide the music's source, though he composed the music over 20 years ago. The project was then commissioned for five solo voices in 1998, but the combination of Wheeler, singer Norma Winstone and the London Vocal Project, led by Pete Churchill, brings a fluid, suite-like permanency and epic scale to the original concept. Poets Stevie Smith, Lewis Carroll and W.B. Yeats provide strikingly diverse imagery surreal, visceral and profound and Wheeler weaves it all together in a sumptuous melodic tapestry where the music of language is meaning enough. The inimitable Winstone's strength and nuanced delivery belie her 70 years. Hers is a remarkable performance, though the balance struck between all the voices makes Mirrors a truly collaborative success. Bassist Steve Watts, drummer James Maddren and pianist Nikki Iles engender a swinging undercurrent, breezy and understated, that's irrevocably felt throughout. These musicians enjoy tremendous understanding; Winstone and Wheeler first recorded together in Azimuth in the 1970s and Iles, saxophonist Mark Lockheart, Watts and Maddren all play with Winstone in the group Printmakers. Little wonder, then, that the evident chemistry seems so effortless and joyfully intuitive.

The LVP's seven sopranos, eight altos, five tenors and five basses are the protagonists on three numbers. "Humpty Dumpty" is a playful take on Carroll's poem, with delightful passing around of the vocals between the choir sections. A deceptive intensity inhabits the mantra-like vocal rhythm of Smith's "The Broken Heart," a particularly hypnotic number punctuated by Wheeler's fine bluesy solo. Wheeler and Iles shine on a swinging arrangement of Smith's "Black March," though its buoyancy derives primarily from the snappy choral cadences. Winstone's performance sets the jewel in the crown. Her dreamy, almost ethereal reading of Carroll's "Through the Looking Glass" is wonderfully sympathetic. A rootsy and mellifluous instrumental passage, driven by Wheeler and Lockheart, serves as an interlude before the choir restores the contemplative mood. Carroll's "Tweedledum" is similarly episodic; jaunty in the choral passages, intimate and spare when Winstone holds court, and swinging when the quintet steps up. The singer, Iles and Lockheart confer a gentle majesty on Smith's seemingly throwaway, four-line poem, "My Hat."

Winstone and Iles treat the ghostly subject matter of "The Deathly Child" with a palpable sense of wonder, though when Winstone sits out the ensemble refashions this harbinger-of-death tale into joyous celebration. The fatalistic view of humankind's condition in Smith's "Breughel" is similarly dressed in more soothing robes by a lovely Burt Bacharach-esque melody. "The Bereaved Swan" captures the contrasting elements of melancholy and lyricism in Smith's words, whereby the choir's graceful waves form a canvas for Wheeler and Lockheart's more emotionally urgent colors. The subdued rhythm of "My Soul" highlights the powerful lyric content, lent suitable poignancy by Winstone's pitch-perfect delivery. How to categorize this glorious music, the ingenuity of Wheeler, Winstone and the LVP? To quote Smith: "Whatever names you give me, I am a breath of fresh air, a change for you." And what price Vol. 2 from James Joyce, via Robert Frost to John Cooper Clarke? ~ Ian Patterson https://www.allaboutjazz.com/mirrors-kenny-wheeler-edition-records-review-by-ian-patterson.php
 

Personnel: Kenny Wheeler: flugelhorn; Norma Winstone: vocals; Nikki Iles: piano; Mark Lockheart: saxophones; Steve Watts: double bass; James Maddren: drums; London Vocal Project: Pete Churchill: Director; sopranos: Fini Bearman; Hannah Berry; Jessica Berry; Helen Burnett; Katie Butler; Joanna Richards; Janni Thompson; tenors: Tommy Antonio; Sam Chaplin; Brendan Dowse; Richard Lake; Adam Saunders; altos: Mishka Adams; Paolo Bottomley; Nikki Franklin; Clara Green; Andi Hopgood; Chloe Potter; Emma Smith; Emmy Urquhart; basses: Kwabena Adjepong; Pat Bamber; Ben Barritt; Pete Churchill; Andrew Woolf.

Mirrors

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Jackie Wilson - You Ain’t Heard Nothin’ Yet

Styles: Soul
Year: 1961
Time: 29:33
File: MP3 @ 320K/s
Size: 68,4 MB
Art: Front

(2:06) 1. Toot Toot Tootsie Goodbye
(3:41) 2. Sonny Boy
(1:45) 3. California Here I Come
(2:46) 4. Keep Smiling at Trouble (Trouble’s a Bubble)
(3:23) 5. You Made Me Love You (I Didn’t Want to Do It)
(2:38) 6. My Yiddishe Momme
(2:02) 7. Swanee
(2:56) 8. April Showers
(3:09) 9. Anniversary Song
(2:49) 10. Rock-A-Bye Your Baby With a Dixie Melody.mp3
(2:35) 11. For Me and My Girl
(2:25) 12. In Our House

I suppose that my knowledge of the history of American pop culture still leaves a lot to be desired, because it was not until my second listen to Jackie Wilson’s You Ain’t Heard Nothin’ Yet, accompanied with a look at Jackie’s own liner notes on the back cover, that I realized the entire LP was a concentrated, half-hour-long tribute to Al Jolson, Jackie’s personal childhood idol and a dear friend to such a great number of other artists, both black and white. The problem is that, while I do enjoy digging into the vaults of American popular music from the pre-war era, it is mostly on behalf of jazz or blues artists, with an occasional bit of folk, country, or, at most, the Andrews Sisters thrown in; people who, like Al Jolson, were more about vaudeville and show business in general the Neil Diamonds and Tom Joneses of their era interest me far less, and inspire me even lesser. (That’s right, I did not even immediately catch on to the title of the LP, which should immediately bring on associations with The Jazz Singer though I do wonder about exactly what percentage of modern young Americans would bring out that particular association faster than I did).

In a way, though, this album was an inevitability. Tribute LPs to legendary artists from the previous decades were becoming a standard thing in the early Sixties, partially due to the first generations of recorded legends beginning to pass away and partially due to the record industry’s yearning for the «good old clean days»: nothing could wipe off the scum of rock’n’roll better than a reappraisal of the comparatively innocent values of grandpa and grandma music. From LaVern Baker to Sam Cooke, everybody on the R&B circuit was doing these and for Jackie Wilson, Al Jolson probably seemed like the perfect choice: The King Of Black Entertainment paying homage to The King Of Blackface Entertainment. The only problem was that for both artists, «entertainment» meant the visual aspect almost as much as the aural; to complete the comparison, people should not only hear both artists, but see them as well, and you didn’t really get to do that in 1961.

My own problem with Al Jolson, of course, lies not in the blackface department (it is almost undignified to hold lengthy ethical debates on whether we should condemn hundred year old practices), but rather in the fact that Al Jolson arrived on the American pop scene too early to make his presence properly redeemable. The love people had for the guy was the same kind of love people show toward Luciano Pavarotti singing O sole mio or, at best, Nessun dorma it’s all about those immensely amplified F-E-E-L-I-N-G-S, inflated to the size of 800cc silicone mammaries and there was never any space for subtlety or emotional sophistication out there because that was simply not what the fans needed. Probably more than anyone else out there in the Radio Age, Al Jolson was the champion of the «give the people what they want» approach, and if not for the unfortunate practice of blackface (which is, after all, what the people also wanted), Al Jolson should have become the perpetual mascot of the pop market, more relevant in that role today than he’d ever been.

But at least one thing you cannot take away from Al Jolson is that, in his heyday, he was cutting edge at least, in taking the combination of those bombastically orchestrated folk ballads with those soaring melodramatic Yiddishe vocals into the studio and spreading it all over the country. On the other hand, having Jackie Wilson who, for a very brief while, may also have been cutting edge in his R&B showmanship try to put his own early Sixties stamp on a set of Al Jolson’s classics feels almost like an artistic surrender. At his best, with songs like ‘Reet Petite’ or ‘Lonely Teardrops’, Wilson was carrying on Jolson’s torch, but it was fueled by a whole other approach to making music; here, he is simply content with reusing what is left of the old stocks of musical oil, so the whole thing feels decidedly regressive rather than progressive.

Of course, the world has moved on. Better recording equipment, tighter backing bands, louder and more bombastic pro­duction values and a powerhouse singer with one of the best throats in the business, making poor old Al with his old-timey crooning feel like a homeless schmuck by comparison. But even if you are a big fan of both Al Jolson (which I am not) and Jackie Wilson (which I am, but strictly limited to the good stuff), I am not entirely sure that You Ain’t Heard Nothin’ Yet shall properly justify its title for you. 1920’s vaudeville remade as early 1960’s orchestrated soul-pop simply may not have been that great an idea.

A song like ‘Toot, Toot, Tootsie, Goo’ Bye!’, for instance, works fine as an ass-kickin’ flapper anthem for the Jazz Age and it can even maintain its slightly hooliganish flavor when remade as contemporary pop-rock by the likes of Brenda Lee. But when Jackie decides to open it with a slow, suspenseful soul intro ("I’m telling you baby I’ve gotta leave you now...!"), he sets our expectations up for something completely different and then launches into the very same vaudeville mood of 1922. It’s a crude transition, and since it is right there at the start of the LP, it symbolically tells us that this whole thing probably won’t work. It’s all just a meaningless nostalgia trip.

Now I won’t be taking any real cheap shots, for instance, guffawing at the idea of a black boy from Highland Park, Michi­gan, trying to put his imprint on a song like ‘My Yiddishe Momme’ considering that the song is placed on a tribute album to a Jewish popular artist who spent half his life performing in blackface, the joke would be on me anyway. (Fun fact, though: apparently, Jolson himself never performed or recorded ‘My Yiddishe Momme’ the song is rather associated with Sophie Tucker so I guess Wilson just put it here as a symbolic nod to Jolson’s ethnic and cultural heritage). Much has been written about the mutual empathy and elements of «cultural symbiosis» between Jewish and Black populations in pre-war America (let my people go and all that), making the gesture feel very reasonable. But it would have felt much more reasonable on the part of somebody like Paul Robeson, the freedom fighter, than Jackie Wilson, the entertainer.

The problem is that throughout the album, Jackie really, really wants to be Al Jolson, the Al Jolson of the Jazz Singer era, but only on those early Sixties’ vocal and instrumental steroids. For sure, he is in peak vocal form, way too peak for my tastes, groveling and worshipping at the altar of these old vaudeville tunes rather than taking them the same way we should be taking them today, or our grandparents should have been taking them in 1961 that is, with a sparkle of irony, perhaps acknowledging their musical merits but chuckling at their emotional innocence and unabashed sentimentality. Quite the opposite: he seems to be taking all of this with far more seriousness than Jolson did himself, and all that bombast which could have, for instance, be successfully applied to a truly modern soul sound (just imagine Jackie Wilson taking on, say, Sam Cooke’s ‘A Change Is Gonna Come’ three years later!), is ultimately wasted on corny old-timey trifles with corny old-timey titles like ‘Keep Smiling At Trouble (Trouble’s A Bubble)’.

There are no individual comments I can make on any of these songs: you either appreciate the idea of the album, in which case you’ll sympathize with all of them, fast or slow, danceable or sentimental or you find it crass and mismatched, in which case the album (unlike Al Jolson’s original recordings) will hardly trigger even historical interest: what sort of music history buff might get excited at the perspective of one fluffy pop entertainer paying tribute to another one? At least Jackie had the good sense not to put out any of these covers as singles. But there is hardly a single gesture in his career more symbolic than this one or more telling whenever we begin to wonder about the exact reasons why Jackie Wilson, ruler supreme of the R&B charts for at least half a decade, has been all but forgotten by critical history when so many of his less commercially successful peers have remained far above footnote status in the same history books. https://onlysolitaire.substack.com/p/review-jackie-wilson-you-aint-heard

You Ain’t Heard Nothin’ Yet

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Patricia Kaas - 1987-2025 Une Vie CD 1, CD 2

Patricia Kaas - 1987-2025 Une Vie CD 1
Styles: Vocal
Year: 2025
Time: 57:12
File: MP3 @ 320K/s
Size: 132,5 MB
Art: Front

(4:05) 1. Entrer dans la lumière
(4:20) 2. Quand j'ai peur de tout
(3:19) 3. Kennedy Rose
(3:46) 4. Les hommes qui passent
(5:14) 5. Ceux qui n'ont rien
(3:01) 6. Une dernière semaine à New York
(2:40) 7. Mon mec à moi (Live)
(3:31) 8. Une fille de l'Est
(4:19) 9. Je voudrais la connaître
(3:08) 10. Adèle
(3:28) 11. Le jour et l'heure
(5:52) 12. Avec le temps (Live)
(5:48) 13. Ma liberté contre la tienne
(4:33) 14. Quand on a que l'amour

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Patricia Kaas - 1987-2025 Une Vie CD 2
Time: 60:59
File: MP3 @ 320K/s
Size: 141,1 MB
Art: Front

(3:22) 1. Mademoiselle chante le blue (Live)
(4:43) 2. Il me dit que je suis belle
(4:30) 3. D'Allemagne (Live)
(4:45) 4. Quand Jimmy dit
(4:59) 5. L'aigle noir
(5:30) 6. Les chansons commencent
(3:30) 7. Rien ne s'arrête
(3:33) 8. C'est les femmes qui mènent la danse
(5:18) 9. La vie en rose
(4:20) 10. Hymne à l'amour
(4:24) 11. If You Go Away
(3:22) 12. Je le garde pour toi
(4:46) 13. Toute la musique que j'aime
(3:51) 14. Les Yeux de ma Mère

This Friday, April 25, 2025, Patricia Kaas returns to the spotlight with a landmark album, a best-of album as touching as it is essential: "1987-2025: A Life."

Patricia Kaas's voice is, first and foremost, a timbre that is instantly recognizable. Warm, deep, sometimes raspy, always unsettling. A voice that tells the story of France in all its most sensitive and contrasting aspects: love and hurt, nostalgia and enthusiasm, memories and hopes.

It's also a voice that has conquered the world. Few French-speaking artists can boast of having sold more than 20 million albums in their career. Patricia Kaas has done just that; from Berlin to Moscow, from Paris to Tokyo, we still sing her choruses.

"1987-2025: A Life," a 38-year career in 28 songs

With "1987-2025: A Life," available as a double CD this Friday, April 25, 2025, the singer from Lorraine offers us much more than a classic best-of. She takes us on a true journey through time, a musical epic in 28 carefully selected tracks. These songs are not only emblematic pieces from her repertoire; they are also chapters in a love story between an artist and her audience.

Of course, it features the great collaborations that have marked her career. Jean-Jacques Goldman, Didier Barbelivien, Pascal Obispo, François Bernheim, Michel Mallory... so many writers who have written for her, and with her, lyrics that are both powerful and sensitive. More recently, Ben Mazué has added his contemporary touch to this already rich adventure.

Tributes and Covers: Passing on a Passion
This new best-of album doesn't just revisit the past. Patricia Kaas also includes vibrant tributes to the artists who inspired her. She covers "Les Yeux de ma mère" by Belgian singer Arno, who passed away in 2022. A previously unreleased song that concludes this double CD.

In addition, other great classics of French song are included: "L'Aigle Noir" by Barbara, "La Vie en Rose" by Édith Piaf, "Avec le Temps" by Léo Ferré, and "Toute la musique que j'aime" by Johnny Hallyday. So many monuments revisited with precision and humility, in the manner of a woman who knows what it means to pass on, bring to life, and enhance musical heritage.

A daughter of the East, a woman of the world
Patricia Kaas has remained true to her roots. Originally from Moselle-Est, she has always proudly claimed this place. But her music has transcended all borders. Her voice is universal, her songs resonate with each of us, whether we're from here or elsewhere.

"1987-2025: A Life" is also the story of this woman who has transcended the ages without ever betraying who she is. An artist of integrity, modesty, yet always whole. A performer who sings with her soul, and who, through the filters of time, continues to move with a rare intensity.

"1987-2025: A Life" is much more than a simple retrospective album. It's a declaration of love to the public, a celebration of an extraordinary artistic journey, a link between yesterday and tomorrow. Available as a double CD starting Friday, April 25, 2025, and on triple vinyl starting May 23, 2025.https://www.francebleu.fr/patricia-kaas-signe-son-grand-retour-avec-1987-2025-une-vie-5516494

1987-2025 Une Vie Cd1, Cd2

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