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 | Jeri BrownFresh StartLabel: Justin Time | Jazz | February 21, 1996Format UPC Order # Unit Price |
Credits Jeri Brown voice Greg Carter soprano saxophone (on track 09) Cyrus Chestnut piano Wali Muhammad drums Avery Sharpe double bass and electric bass Production Credits | TracksNo Title Duration Excerpts 04 Fresh Start 00:06:04 05 The Moment I Look At You 00:06:34 06 Bohemia After Dark 00:06:06 07 Moonray 00:07:12 08 You're A Joy 00:06:10 09 Vision Is The Key 00:05:05 10 Orange Sky 00:07:12 11 Shall We Gather By The River 00:04:41 12 Fresh Start (Reprise) 00:00:27 Liner NotesConfounding expectation and boldly charting new territory are the hallmarks of any great jazz artist. Betty Carter lost count of the number of times she was fired from Lionel Hampton's big band at the turn of the 1950s for leaping in with Lester instead of sticking to swing. Yet without her innovation and resolve, jazz singing would not be where it is today.Faithfully hewing to this axiom, Missouri-born jazz vocalist Jeri Brown has fashioned a unique approach to scat which owes little to the acknowledged masters of the form, Betty Carter included. Idiosyncratic and stunning, her sultry shaping of syllabic material is inventive in its sonorities without sacrificing density or speed, even flirting with vocalese and Slim Gaillardesque vocal humour. Check out the title cut of this CD, where her scatting sounds like a dancing trumpet, or her solo that opens Oscar Pettiford's exercise in Harlem bounce, "Bohemia After Dark", where her scat is more like a trombone, a slide ride peppered with consonants. Yet for Brown, reinventing scat was not enough. After her dazzling soprano flights on previous releases such as Mirage and A Timeless Place, Brown felt it was time to strike out in a new direction, time for a Fresh Start. Urged on by her pianist on this date, Cyrus Chestnut, Brown started singing lower, dipping deep down into her remarkable four octave vocal compass as they cut the opener, "Come, Come And Play With Me". Here Brown matches her romantic, smoldering lyrics with a voice that's deliciously dark, as strong and heady as black coffee. Whether she's swinging low or soaring triumphant, Brown's voice has more of an edge this time out. Pocked with beguiling elisions, slight hesitancies and rough edges, it is truly a vulnerable and personal performance, at once unfettered and unafraid. Brown attributes the candid new direction to the songbook of her old friend from high school days and a providential session with a remarkable band. The original material here, penned by Brown with the help of a talented young arranger and teacher named Greg Carter is unlike anything Brown has attempted before. Carter's songs complement the slinky standards and traditional gospel numbers with the rhythms and textures of contemporary soul, funk and R & B. Yet before you say M-BASE, the songs are not straitjacketed with the downtown theory and tricky time signatures of that Brooklyn-based collective, but are altogether more soulful, and this has everything to do with the band. The band grew out of a live date that Brown and drummer Wali Muhammad arranged at Montreal's Lion d'Or in the spring of 1995, and they came from the four corners of the States: pianist Chestnut hails from Baltimore, Muhammad from Berkeley, and bassist Avery Sharpe from Atlanta. Yet these are no mere rootless cosmopolitans; each has a finely developed sense of the jazz tradition and brings consummate skill and fresh ideas to the group. As McCoy Tyner's bassist, Sharpe has long harbored an experimental jones, and often thrums his bass like a flamenco player. Muhammad is right up there with Sharpe, deftly switching between a traditional kit and funk traps and casting a wide rhythmic net And then there's Cyrus. Cyrus Chestnut embodies the evolution of jazz piano playing, from its ragtime, gospel and stride roots through bebop, free and modal forms. His solo on "The Moment I Look At You" flirts with dissonance, pounds in the lower register barrelhouse-style, then shifts gears to swing. His dazzling turn on "You're A Joy" is a thing of beauty, incorporating elements of stride, spiky bebop and glasslike runs. That said, Chestnut's playing always has an ear cocked to the other players; for example, the celeste-like sound of his electric piano perfectly complements Brown's torch song delivery on "Nothing Else But You". Brown found Chestnut almost spiritually devoted to the music, and says she felt "a sense of permanence" when recording with this band. Should this group become a working quartet, not only would they take this material to even higher levels, but the tradition of jazz singing would be all the richer for it. -Andrew Jones, January 1996 Montreal-based writer Andrew Jones' book Piunderphonics, Pataphysics and Pop Mechanics was published by SAF Publishing in 1995 |
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