LOST TRACKS : Good CDs We Overlooked Last Year
LOST TRACKS : Good CDs We Overlooked Last Year
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CELEBRATION
Sheila Jordan and Cameron Brown
Talk about your high-wire acts. On her latest recording, released in August, singer Sheila Jordan has only the robust acoustic bass of Cameron Brown to support her. On "Celebration," recorded live at a New York club, she shows a nimble, daring vocal style and an open, inventive spirit that makes every song an adventure.
Now 77, Jordan has a quiet, almost underground reputation as a vocalist revered by jazz musicians -- her first performance accompanied only by bass was with Charles Mingus in the 1950s -- yet is all but unknown to the wider public. Despite a hard life -- drink, drugs, divorce and decades of popular neglect -- she still has a remarkably lithe voice. She sounds youthful and bright, a little like a more sophisticated Rickie Lee Jones.
Jordan has an innate sense of swing that makes any instruments besides Brown's steady, tuneful bass superfluous. Jordan may be something of an acquired taste -- especially with only a bass to accompany her -- but she has a warm musical presence that makes you want to join her on her musical excursions, from Duke Ellington to Fats Waller to Oscar Brown Jr.
The disc contains three time-shifting medleys that allow Jordan to scat, to glide into her upper register and to alter the tempo until she ends up with the vocal equivalent of dancing on the ceiling. When she brings Jay Clayton to the microphone, the two singers tear into Dizzy Gillespie's "Birk's Works" like a pair of dueling saxophonists. After an intricate bebop passage, a joyous Jordan rightly observes, "Was that hip or what?"
-- Matt Schudel
SPELLED IN BONES
The Fruit Bats
The Fruit Bats are technically a group, but they're really a constellation of musicians circling one central figure, lead singer Eric Johnson. The Bats' latest CD builds on the 2003 release "Mouthfuls," and it boasts the same kind of dreamy, folk-inspired pop rock Johnson has written since the start of the decade.
"Spelled in Bones" builds slowly, becoming increasingly compelling as it progresses, and taking off with "Canyon Girl," its fourth and perhaps catchiest number. The song is infused with a sense of recklessness and escape, complete with lilting guitars and lyrics that declare, "But cover me, 'cause I'm going in/And I won't return back to the run of the mill again."
