Alyssa Graham - Echo

Styles: Vocal
Year: 2008
File: MP3@320K/s
Time: 51:21
Size: 120,6 MB
Art: Front

(6:10)  1. America
(4:41)  2. Pictures Of You
(4:19)  3. Echo
(3:59)  4. Arkansas
(4:47)  5. My Love
(5:17)  6. Butterflies
(3:42)  7. I Burn For You
(5:38)  8. Involved Again
(4:03)  9. Once Upon A Summertime
(5:27) 10. Coming Home
(3:14) 11. Izaura

Jazz is a paradox that is both compromising and uncompromising. It is compromising as an assimilating art, one that absorbs all influences that touch it. It is uncompromising that jazz demands virtuosity and creativity. It is this paradox that allows the genre to contain both a Sarah Vaughan and Dianna Krall, and a Grant Green and John McLaughlin beneath its tent. It is jazz that welcomes the better angels of creation into its realm to manifest any number of delightful and inventive manners. Jazz, by its very nature, is evolving in four dimensions. Norah Jones, for example, with a crack band and a Country and Western sensibility, has reformed the interface between jazz and popular music. Think of Jones as Josef Haydn, a musical trailblazer inventing a new way to look at an established genre, one further perfected by Mozart's inevitable invention. Norah Jones' Mozart is Alyssa Graham. New York native Graham and guitarist/husband Douglas Graham recorded the singer's first release in their living room on a self-produced shoestring. The result was What Love Is (2005) which was selected for several Best of 2005 lists. Graham has since honed her musical approach to a fine edge, with Echo at once pure metal and perfect amalgam. Echo boasts a Latin influence and indeed one exists. But there is none of the piquant tartness of a typical Latin outing. Instead, the collective efforts of Jeff Haynes' essential percussion, guitarists Graham and Romero Lubambo and the Hendrik Meurkens-influenced Gregoire Maret are distilled into dense tension, sounding as if it has been there all the time. This is familiar music and that is its magic. Paul Simon's "America" is rendered as a siren song buoyed by purring congas and round nylon stings. This same formula transforms Michel LeGrand's "Once upon a Summertime" in a similar manner; quietly and with great grace. 

Pianist John Cowherd shares composing duties with both Bryan McCann ("Echo" and "Arkansas") and Douglas Graham ("Pictures of You" and "My Love") to anchor the disc. "Echo" is a sophisticated vignette, a cross between Burton Cummings and Bruce Hornsby. Graham's delicious intonation is perfectly balanced by Cowherd's Norah Jones-like octaves. "Arkansas" is a potent pastoral smart and informed and mysterious. "My Love" powerfully recalls Elton John's Tumbleweed Connection (MCA , 1971) and Jackson Browne's The Pretender (Asylum, 1976), especially in Cowherd's fine piano solo and Graham's solid high, rich alto. Into this mix is "Involved Again." Composed by Jack Reardon ("The Good Life"), "Involved Again" was written for Billie Holiday and was slated to be recorded by her, save for the singer's death in 1959. The song remained shelved until Reardon heard Alyssa Graham. The song would have been perfect next to "I'm A Fool to Want You" and "But Beautiful," from Holiday's Lady in Satin (Columbia, 1958). Graham captures perfectly the conflict of forgiven love, totally committed at a cost. She has spent her time wisely, perfecting her art and the art that came before her. Echo is a fine wine with a heady base and nose and an expansive finish. It is to be savored after many listenings. ~ C.Michael Bailey https://www.allaboutjazz.com/echo-alyssa-graham-sunnyside-records-review-by-c-michael-bailey.php

Personnel: Alyssa Graham: vocals; Jon Cowherd: vocals, French horn, piano, organ; Douglas Graham: guitars; Romero Lubambo: guitar; Elizabeth Lim-Dutton, Laura Seaton: violin; Lawrence Dutton: viola; Sachi Patitucci: cello; Gregoire Maret: harmonica; Doug Weiss: bass guitar; Obed Calvaire: drum; Jeff Haynes: percussion.

Echo

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Alyssa Graham - Lock, Stock and Soul

Styles: Adult Contemporary
Year: 2012
File: MP3@320K/s
Time: 56:06
Size: 128,9 MB
Art: Front

(4:41)  1. Til my heart quakes
(3:02)  2. I know
(4:05)  3. Exploded view
(4:34)  4. High time
(4:04)  5. He's a lover
(2:38)  6. Round & round
(3:23)  7. Until the last leaf falls
(4:39)  8. Ain't my kind of boy
(3:59)  9. I'll stay with you
(2:39) 10. You're the one
(4:02) 11. Lock, stock and soul
(4:47) 12. Tidal wave
(3:15) 13. Watching the sky
(2:57) 14. Lament
(3:13) 15. Don't leave me this way

Vocalist Alyssa Graham earned accolades from the music press for the jazz-leaning sounds of her first two albums, What Love Is and Echo, but Graham has changed lanes with her third album and has set her sights clearly on pop music. Most artists who give themselves this sort of creative makeover have chart success in mind, but that doesn't seem to be what Graham is aiming for on Lock, Stock & Soul; this is hardly the sort of pop music that has been selling many records in the past two or three decades, recalling the Laurel Canyon singer/songwriter community of the late 1960s and early '70s in its easygoing vibes and mellow but precise craft. Fittingly, while Graham relied on cover material on her earlier albums, she wrote or co-wrote five of the 12 tunes on Lock, Stock & Soul, while David Garza contributed four songs to the set list.

However, if this is truly the music Graham has wanted to make all along, it's tempting to say she was better off following someone else's muse. Lock, Stock & Soul is the musical equivalent of a cup of warm milk, warm and soothing but short on personality, and more likely to lull you off to dreamland rather than make you sit up and take notice. On these sessions, Graham's vocals are light, breathy, and subdued, with the phrasing lacking the jazzy angles of her earlier work and her instrument suggesting an artier and less emphatic Olivia Newton-John. Graham's songwriting also confirms she was wise to interpret other people's work on her first two discs; as a lyricist, she sounds like a high school poetry student who is likable but has little to say, and it's unfortunate but true that the one song she wrote with no outside help, "He's a Lover," is easily the weakest track on the album. 

And while Graham has some gifted accompanists on Lock, Stock & Soul (including Chris Bruce on guitar, Me'Shell Ndegéocello on bass, and Michael Jerome on drums), this music is so polite it feels more like wallpaper than any sort of emotional, expressive art. Maybe Lock, Stock & Soul really is the sound of Alyssa Graham's soul, but if that's the truth, you'd have to go back to the Wizard of Oz to find a better example of an invented persona that was more interesting that the person behind the curtain. ~ Mark Deming   http://www.allmusic.com/album/the-lock-stock-and-soul-mw0002231927

Lock, Stock and Soul

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