The Mosaic Project: Love and Soul, Terri Lyne Carrington, Ajari/Concord
A few years ago, the drummer, bandleader, composer and producer Terri Lyne Carrington won her first Grammy, for best jazz vocal album. The album was The Mosaic Project (Concord Jazz), which highlighted a regal procession of guest talent — heavy-gauge jazz singers like Carmen Lundy, Cassandra Wilson and Dianne Reeves — along with an estimable all-female band.
Conditions have changed a bit for Carrington since then: She now stands dead-center on the Grammy radar, having also won the award for best jazz instrumental album last year. (She was the first woman ever to win in that category, a fact worth chewing on for a moment.) So Carrington’s new album, The Mosaic Project: Love and Soul, comes preloaded with a proven format and a set of expectations.
The subtitle can be taken more or less at face value: To the extent that The Mosaic Project was a jazz-vocal album, its sequel delves into romantic, quiet-storm R&B. Here, then, is Oleta Adams, purring her way through the Luther Vandross hit For You to Love. Here, too, is Chaka Khan, drawing out her smoky phrases in a slow-funk take on Frank Sinatra’s I’m a Fool to Want You. And Natalie Cole, striking a pop-gospel tone on a buoyant drum-and-bass revision of Duke Ellington’s spiritual Come Sunday.
Carrington is a seasoned adept in the studio, and her production sounds lush and crisp. Where she pushes herself is in the songwriting: Half of the tracks bear her credit, either alone or with partners like the soignee jazz singer Nancy Wilson, who contributed to Imagine This, a persuasive argument for rekindling distant youthful passions. (“And if we dare go back again,” Wilson proposes, in a sensuous half-whisper, “our finest years are still ahead.”)
Most of Carrington’s other tunes are well-made vehicles for their assigned singers: Lalah Hathaway, Ledisi, Jaguar Wright and Chante Moore. A samba-inflected track called Can’t Resist finds Carrington doing the singing herself, more than passably; it also has a smart wah-wah flute solo by Elena Pinderhughes.
It’s no longer necessary (if it ever was) for Carrington to explain her reasons for stocking these albums with female musicians. But it’s hard to understand fully her motive for bringing in the actor Billy Dee Williams as a kind of masculine counterweight, a smoldering yang to the music’s yin.
“Women have always been very much a part of my life,” he intones at the top of one track, “and I don’t mean just from a sexual point of view, but in a very beautiful, wonderful way, actually.” You don’t say.
— Nate Chinen, NY Times News Service
Midnight, Grace Potter, Hollywood
When a singer from an established band goes solo, potential problems abound. After years hewing to one set of rules and restrictions, there are so many paths not taken, so many styles up for the grabbing — the idea is that, now, anything can happen. Of course, most singers solve that problem by ignoring it — going solo generally isn’t a matter of artistic freedom but one of pragmatism, be it of the interpersonal or financial sort. For them, freedom is just a new kind of shackle.
Not so for Grace Potter, for more than a decade the frontwoman of Grace Potter and the Nocturnals, a slick and ambitious Vermont roots-minded soul-rock band. In its early years especially, the band was boisterous but unchallenging, largely there to provide arrangements over which Potter’s howl could soar free.
Given that, her version of liberation, on her solo debut album, Midnight, is an unexpected one. With some old collaborators, including members of the Nocturnals, and some new ones, like the producer Eric Valentine, Potter has not only remade her sound, she’s also moved herself farther from its center. She’s a pop-rock eclectic now, pinballing among styles and letting her voice fill in the outlines rather than draw them.
Some recent experiences have suggested that Potter was always capable of a shift like this. On the 2011 Kenny Chesney duet You and Tequila she was restrained and tender enough to not outsing her host. And her experience singing covers with the Nocturnals paid off in June, when they opened for the Rolling Stones and she duetted with Mick Jagger on Gimme Shelter. (It’s a song she and her band frequently covered.)
And she had been planting seeds in her own music. The last Nocturnals album, The Lion the Beast the Beat, from 2012, was the band’s most audacious one — the arrangements were looser, and Potter was, too.
On Midnight, everything’s come undone, often for the better. In a few places, it recalls Tango in the Night, Fleetwood Mac’s lustrous last (noteworthy) gasp from 1987. Potter doesn’t quite have the tragedy Stevie Nicks so effortlessly channels, but she nonetheless finds moody pockets for her voice while the band hones a chilly take on brisk rock.
On Alive Tonight, the band shifts directions a few times, from shuffling to jangling to rousing, and Potter keeps up, keeping it gentle when needed, and shrieking when that’s not enough. It almost sounds like a soul song Fatboy Slim would have chopped to blaring pieces 15 years ago. Empty Heart has Muscle Shoals rumble, and Instigators suggests modern-day lite-funk, from Chromeo to Pharrell. (She also in places moves beyond platitudinous lyrics, like on Your Girl, which toys with sexual ambiguity just as Little Big Town’s Girl Crush does, though less coyly.)
What’s most intriguing on this album, though, is how Potter willingly and somewhat brazenly submits to the whole. Often, like on Low and The Miner, she’s obscured by design — not outlandishly so, but just enough that her voice is denied its full punch. It’s an effective choice, even if not a totally natural one. Which is why it’s reassuring to hear, at the album’s conclusion, Let You Go, a rough ballad about loss that Potter is given free rein on — or rather, one in which she takes the reins, a solo artist in full control.
— Jon Caramanica, NY Times News Service
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