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Canwest News Service
JAZZ
Choices
Terence Blanchard
Concord
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Trust jazz trumpeter Terence Blanchard to deliver a set of music that challenges his bandmates and excites the listener. Now, if only he would stick to music.
Choices, a strong program for sextet, glides along beautifully until it derails every so often for spoken-word segments by Dr. Cornel West. These mini-sermons have noble enough messages (music is good, indifference is bad, success shouldn’t be measured by how much money you have, etc.), but they bring everything to a halt. This works in concert, but not on a recording.
Between stops, however, the music flows. Even though this is a mid- size group, its sound is orchestral, and solos by Blanchard, guitarist Lionel Loueke, saxophonist Walter Smith III and pianist Fabian Almazan are first-rate. – Marke Andrews, Vancouver Sun
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JAZZ
In Between Moods
Tony Foster
Tony Foster Music
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Vancouver pianist Tony Foster left university with a degree in commerce, but the Muse had other ideas. A favourite sideman of vocalist Dee Daniels, Foster has just released, through tonyfostermusic.com, an excellent nine-track trio record in the company of bassist Russell Botten and drummer Joe Poole.
Foster’s arrangement of Billy Strayhorn’s Take the ‘A’ Train makes the old chestnut almost unrecognizable; even though the band unlocks it from its swing-beat shackles, the tune still swings in a different way. Mr. J, which Foster wrote for piano idol Ahmad Jamal, sounds more like McCoy Tyler, as the leader drops bomb-chords with his left hand while exploring with the right. Botten plays a pedal bass figure and Poole uses brushes on A.J., which swings in the spirit of Jamal. – Marke Andrews, Vancouver Sun
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FOLK/BLUES
For Rosa, Maeve and Noreen
Samuel James
Northern Blues
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Singer-songwriters want to write good songs that tell a story. It also helps if they can sing and play an instrument well enough to impress that song upon a listener. Samuel James does all of these things and accompanies himself on a battery of instruments: guitar, banjo, piano and harmonica. Though still a young man, the Maine-based musician echoes another era, the acoustic Delta blues of the 1920s and ’30s, only the stories he tells have a certain new-millennium ironic sensibility.
Well, some of them do. A lot of the 14 songs on For Rosa, Maeve and Noreen, James’s third CD, could have been crafted in the 1930s. Joe Fletcher’s Blues tells of a man trying to get away from a demanding woman, and the banjo-driven Darlin’ Maeve is the reverse, about a guy who can’t get enough of a woman. – Marke Andrews, Vancouver Sun
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POP
Sainthood
Tegan and Sara
(Sire/Warner)
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Confession: Canadian twin-sister indie-pop duo Tegan and Sara have long been one of my guilty pleasures.
The pair’s intimate, infectious pop tunes were long pigeonholed as fodder for coffee-shop loitering college girls — until Jack White fell for their song Walking with a Ghost.
The White Stripes cover (and title track of the band’s 2005 EP) confirmed the sisters’ undeniable songwriting smarts, but also the growing edge in their music.
That edge is sharper than ever on this sixth album, which delves into gritty punk and new wave-inspired territory with production help from Death Cab for Cutie’s Chris Walla (who produced their fifth album, The Con) and Howard Redekopp (who oversaw 2004’s So Jealous). –T’cha Dunlevy, Canwest News Service
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SOULBOOK
Rod Stewart
Sony BMG
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Why mess with a proven formula? Rod Stewart follows the success of his Great American Songbook series with this batch of soul remakes. "A sentimental fool am I," he sings, on It’s the Same Old Song, "to hear an old love song and want to cry." He’s faithful to a fault to the originals, as he makes his way through Stevie Wonder’s My Cherie Amour (featuring Wonder on harmonica) and other classics. –T’cha Dunlevy, Canwest News Service
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IF ON A WINTER’S NIGHT
Sting
(Deutsche Grammophon/Universal)
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The holidays must be a blast at Sting’s place. Why sing carols when you can recite Lo, How a Rose E’er Blooming, apparently after chugging an epic supply of NyQuil? The lack of holly-jolly-ness didn’t have to be a fatal flaw in Winter’s Night — and to be fair, the seasonal collection isn’t exactly a Christmas album. But sombre reflection is one thing, laughable gravitas another. — Jordan Zivitz, Canwest News Service
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COSMIC EGG
Wolfmother
Modular Records
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Chemistry is everything and Australia’s Wolfmother has lost much of what made their storm so potent on the band’s 2005 debut. Even so, there’s enough steroid powered psychedelia here to give Wolfmother Mach 2 a chance. — Heath McCoy, Canwest News Service
