Savina Yannatou: Watersong (ECM 2772)
Four very different vocalists feature in this set of reviews, the first being Savina Yannatou, from Greece. She shares honours on Watersong with Tunisian singer Lamia Bedioui and the Primavera en Salonico, a mixed sextet of accordion, flute, strings and percussion that was formed in 1993 to play arrangements of Sephardic folk songs.
Yannatou’s fifth ECM album revolves around the theme of water, the life-sustaining source that is both a blessing and a curse, a theme that brings together 14 songs from around the Mediterranean world and from different epochs. Not surprisingly, Ariel’s “rich and strong” song Full Fathom Five from The Tempest is the inspiration for this set, alongside songs of the desert realm in Arabic and the Bedouin dialect sung by Bedioui, a setting of a 10th-century poem by an Arab prince sitting between a South Indian lament and a notably urgent Greek carol, an Irish Gaelic song preceding a Corsican tune. The set ends with an unexpected and intense meeting between the African American gospel song Wade In The Water and the Egyptian traditional Allah Musau (God Of Moses).
The multicultural juxtapositions are sometimes surprising, the singers and musicians working well together to illuminate the connections between the varying traditions. The entire set is wondrous, although musical purists might be put off by its sheer variety.
Brigitte Beraha with Alan Barnes & Barry Green: Tea For Three (Woodville Records WVCD155)
In more traditional fashion comes this delightful collaboration between vocalist Brigitte Beraha (originally of Turkish background), alto saxophonist and clarinettist Alan Barnes, and pianist Barry Green, recorded live in London’s Vortex club in February 2023. Their repertoire features three standards, plus We Have Not Long To Love by Beraha with lyrics by Tennessee Williams, Barry Green’s Solitude, lyrics courtesy of AA Milne, and Pra Dizier Adeus, a lesser-known and beautiful slow bossa nova by Edu Lobo and Torquato Neto. The opening Tea For Two is an invitation rather than a statement, Irving Berlin’s The Best Thing For You is fast-paced wit, while the concluding I’ll Be Seeing You by Sammy Kahn and Irving Kahal gently unrolls in anticipation.
Beraha’s voice is always lucid and nicely tentative, notably on her own song, and is consistently well supported by Green’s inventive piano lines and Barnes’s often wistful and oblique interjections. There’s nothing hurried about this fine set, nothing rushed, and it’s all the better for it.
Brittany Davis: Black Thunder (Loosegroove Records)
Our third vocalist, the pianist Brittany Davis, has a tough backstory: born blind in Kansas City, she then moved to Seattle to live with her grandmother after her mother was incarcerated. But from adversity came strength, and all these 17 songs – nine lengthy pieces interrupted by eight brief Ancestors interludes – are profoundly strong. Supported by a local rhythm section of a notably inventive Evan Flory-Barnes on bass and D’Vonne Lewis on drums, Davis recorded this spontaneous, raw collaboration during an intense 48-hour studio session, her music blending jazz with Afro-centric and black cultural influences. Some of the songs are about hiding pain and suffering and escaping from the past and its harsh realities while others honour those who struggle and survive.
Raw, emotional, and resonant, Black Thunder is not always an easy listen, but Davis’s yearning voice is beguiling, insistent and soulful, her piano both quiet and forceful. What a strong set this is.
Macy Gray: Stripped (Chesky EVSA2898S)
In complete contrast to end, American singer Macy Gray, famed for her rasping voice and commanding stage presence – she stands over six feet tall – first made her name with her 1999 debut album On How Life Is, but her later recording career never quite repeated that initial triumph. So in April 2016 she took a risk and recorded what was in effect a two-day live set in a former Roman Catholic church in Brooklyn, all the musicians crowded round a single microphone just as Bessie Smith and others had done in the 1920s.
The jazz feel of the album makes it an outlier in her work – although in truth it is more of a blues set – but as she has commented: “I am naturally a jazz singer. My style and the way I phrase and write is often from jazz.” The quartet supporting her are in fine form, with Wallace Roney on trumpet, an expressive Russell Malone on guitar, an excellent Daryl Johns on bass, and the gently hustling Ari Hoenig on drums, but it always Gray’s vocals that capture attention – her beguiling mix of speech and song, her wayward intonation that is always exactly what is required.
Some of the 10 songs are remakes of her originals, notably a relaxed, laidback I Try from On How Life Is, for as Gray later remarked, this set “was a completely unexpected but refreshing and fun thing to do”. Best of all is the concluding Lucy, a slow blues composed in real time and distinguished by Roney’s exquisite trumpet solos. This album was first released in 2016 and then reissued in a deluxe edition in 2023: it is that version that has been reissued today. It’s good to have it back in circulation.
