ONCE I WAS AN EAGLE, Laura Marling, Ribbon Music
“I will not be a victim of romance,” Laura Marling declares near the start of her magnificent new album, Once I Was an Eagle (Ribbon Music). That doesn’t stop her from plunging into it. In her new songs, love is combative, tempting, cruel, inscrutable, predatory and yet, occasionally, a comfort, with music to match every change of heart and mind. Once I Was an Eagle is the fourth album by this 23-year-old British songwriter, and her ambitions continue to grow.
Marling was a teenager when she emerged in London alongside groups like Mumford & Sons, revealing herself as a songwriter displaced in time: a musical child of the late 1960s. She’s closer to Joni Mitchell, Sandy Denny, Pentangle, John Martyn and the Incredible String Band than to anyone of her own generation. Marling has cultivated vintage skills. Her songwriting brings together the diaristic and the mythical. Her voice is full of grown-up depth and subtleties. She shows a genuine connection with British and American traditions, and she has the guitar virtuosity for arrangements that are resonant, intricate and propulsive.
Once I Was an Eagle has the sound of real-time, organic studio performances. It was made in a week, with Marling recording all her guitars and vocals in one day, then working with her producer, Ethan Johns, and a few other musicians to build arrangements around them: percussion, keyboards, cello. It has acoustic guitars at its core, but doesn’t rule out electric ones; it has moments of solo reflection, of jazzy assurance and of ringing folk-rock.
The album begins with a tour de force: seven connected songs, separated from the second half of the album by an instrumental interlude. They don’t have a narrative but feel like a chronicle of desire, betrayals and hard-won lessons. Marling moves between pensive ballads and hurtling, hard-strummed taunts and warnings. “When we were in love/I was an eagle and you were a dove,” she sings. “You were a dove and I rose about you and preyed.”
Many songs are infused with Indian music, reflecting the lessons of her collaborations in 2009-10 with Mumford & Sons and the Dharohar Project, a group of Rajasthani musicians. In Breathe, folky picking turns to syncopation, Western scales give way to Eastern modes and drones and a new momentum takes over — only to mesh, in Master Hunter, with a wry Bob Dylan homage, quoting It Ain’t Me, Babe in the cadences of Tangled Up in Blue.
Marling can wrap her thoughts in literary allusion — like Undine sung to the mythical naiad — or she can suddenly seem unguarded, as in the hymnlike Once: “Once is enough to make you think twice/About laying your love out on the line.” Her romance is philosophical as well as passionate, archetypal as well as personal; her songs gracefully raise as many conundrums as they answer.
— JON PARELES, New York Times News Service
MAGNETIC, Terence Blanchard, Blue Note
A swinging 12-bar blues crops up a few tracks into Magnetic, the new album by the trumpeter Terence Blanchard, and in context it feels both earthy and exotic. The tune, Don’t Run, involves a pair of guests, the bassist Ron Carter and the saxophonist Ravi Coltrane, so it’s an outlier on an album devoted to a steady-working band. But what really sticks out is its style, a callback to the hard-spun postbop with which Blanchard first made his name 30 years ago.
Magnetic isn’t really about that style, even though Blanchard, 51, still has the technical power and precision of his hotshot younger self. The album’s preferred strain of modern jazz is at once shinier and more brooding, a silvery, reverberant thing.
Blanchard has honed this sound assiduously over the last decade, working with intuitive younger musicians like the saxophonist Brice Winston and the drummer Kendrick Scott. They appear here alongside the pianist Fabian Almazan and the bassist Joshua Crumbly. And with at least one composition from each member of the quintet, Magnetic holds to Blanchard’s recent custom as a bandleader.
He’s prolific enough to have filled the album with his own music — he scored the recent Broadway production of A Streetcar Named Desire, and his first opera, Champion, will have its premiere next month at the Opera Theater of St. Louis — but he wants to inspire a dual spirit of ownership and discovery among the band. The best proof is Pet Step Sitter’s Theme Song, an intricately flowing tune by Almazan, with a curled melody so fetching that it later receives a solo piano reprise (as Comet).
Blanchard’s band, which will appear at the Jazz Standard in New York this week, starting Wednesday, is adept at evoking a cinematic melancholy. At times the album’s atmospherics, especially the digital reverb and other electronics applied to the trumpet, feel superficial and facile. When the guitarist Lionel Loueke shows up with his effects on several tracks, the results are worlds more natural.
It can’t be an accident that this band keeps nodding toward the mid-1960s Miles Davis Quintet, which was likewise led by a trumpeter and partly shaped by his sidemen. Jacob’s Ladder, by Crumbly, bears the harmonic imprint of Herbie Hancock, one member of that Davis band; Time to Spare, by Winston, evokes Wayne Shorter, another one. And given that Carter is the group’s third surviving alumnus, Don’t Run might not be an anomaly after all. On an album so acutely concerned with the present tense, it suggests that the past isn’t something to flee.
— NATE CHINEN, New York Times News Service
FAITH, HOPE Y AMOR, Frankie J, Universal Latino
Frankie J has been shuttling between worlds for so long it’s tough to remember where he stands tallest and most confidently. A Mexican-American singer whose biggest solo hit was a hip-hop-influenced English language cover of a Dominican-American bachata hit, Frankie J has pinballed widely since then — guest hooks on hip-hop songs, straight-ahead covers of American hits, romantic Latin ballads and more.
Which is to say Frankie J is so flexible, and often such a convincing singer, that it’s been perhaps more of a detriment than an asset. Faith, Hope y Amor is his first major-label album in several years, and it’s clearly trying to make up for lost time, and lost styles.
Throughout he leans on old tricks. One of the standout tracks here is a Spanish cover of Shontelle’s monster ballad Impossible, one of the great pop singles of 2010. Beautiful, a piano ballad that turns into crisp synth-pop (and then adds a verse from Pitbull, the current king of Latin crossover pop) isn’t far from, say, something Bruno Mars might sing. And Frankie J has plenty in common with that singer — schooled in R&B but not beholden to it, a light but assertive vocal tone and style agnosticism that allows him to sound comfortable no matter what the milieu.
But there’s a difference between inhabiting styles and owning them, and on this pleasant but disjointed album Frankie J excels when he stops worrying about gimmick and instead leans on the power of his voice, like on the elegant 1980s-influenced R&B of Siempre Te Amare, this album’s highlight.
The last song here is Like a Flag, a regional-Mexican-music-influenced club-pop number that comes off as a craven color-by-numbers attempt to bandwagon onto the dance-pop of the day. As on much of this album, Frankie J sounds fine but maybe not at home, wherever that might be.
— JON CARAMANICA, New York Times News Service
WOMANCHILD, Cecile McLorin Salvant, Mack Avenue
You can see Cecile McLorin Salvant’s WomanChild, her second album but her first with any distribution and production value, as a marker: the one to beat, for what it represents. And it represents, let’s say, a young musician’s act of historical synthesis, a responsible and almost ethical act.
Salvant is only 23, and she’s figured out her own long continuum, from the 1920s to roughly the 1980s, Bessie Smith to Betty Carter, with Billie Holiday and Sarah Vaughan and Abbey Lincoln along the way. OK, good. Since the ‘80s, we’ve seen this from lots of great musicians in their youth, from Wynton Marsalis to Jason Moran; as jazz becomes a hundred-something years old and an increasingly acquired taste for cultural-memory adepts, a reshuffling or reshoring of past history is exciting, even central.
But to concentrate on Salvant’s song choices and all the bases she’s covering might gloss over the best parts of WomanChild, which is the precision of her wide voice and also her volatility, her tension between deference and extravagance, her willingness to play with sound and start rising to the higher atmospheres of improvising, where some of the greatest musicians get more mileage out of forgetting than out of remembering. And, too, her rich partnership with the pianist Aaron Diehl, who is also a kind of classicist at play -- a John Lewis and stride-piano admirer who puts lots of space and thought into his phrases and arrangements.
On Rodgers and Hart’s I Didn’t Know What Time It Was — one of only two common standards on this record - there’s a great sequence of her singing after a bass solo by Rodney Whitaker and a piano solo by Diehl. Her singing digs in; your hearing quickens. She starts with a soft, high, thin, cool-and-prim tone; she moves toward skipping rhythms and drone notes; then she starts really improvising, making her voice fluid, letting the groove carry her. After the line “life was no prize,” suddenly her voice changes, darkens and becomes heavier and soggier, almost drunk, before snapping back to lightness again. On one level, phrase-by-phrase, it’s various strategies of Carter or Vaughan; on another, as it gets deeper, it’s just play, with much less agenda, strange and good.
But back to the song choices, because they matter and they do actually set a mark, raise the bar. They show someone curious and unworried about reaching. Here is Nobody, by Bert Williams, the vaudeville performer; here is You Bring Out the Savage in Me, recorded by Valaida Snow in 1934, a satire of the male gaze and the racist one, too; her own waltz-swing arrangement of the poem Le Front Cache Sur Tes Genoux, by the Haitian poet Ida Faubert (Salvant grew up in a French-speaking household in Miami); an eight-minute version of What a Little Moonlight Can Do that goes slow and very fast, very low and very high, passing through near-abstraction, without grating or overreaching; Fats Waller’s Jitterbug Waltz; a few moody originals; and John Henry, an American folk standard whose origin is mysterious and not totally understood. Neither, you might say, is her talent.
— BEN RATLIFF, NY Times News Service
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