Free TC
Ty Dolla Sign
(Atlantic)
A slow, breezy track about the joys and heartbreaks of Los Angeles street life that swells into a storm of fervid strings. An acoustic-soul collaboration with Babyface full of mean-mugging talk. An up-tempo motivational speech with Kanye West and Diddy. A song that, rather than merely sampling the Jagged Edge classic Let’s Get Married, unravels its core strands and weaves it into a new tapestry. A series of jailhouse phone calls.
These are just some of the savvy plays on Free TC, the debut major label album by R&B polymath Ty Dolla Sign. Free TC — often exceptional, and easily one of the best R&B albums of this year — is elaborate in conception and execution but still feels off the cuff.
Ty Dolla Sign is one of the most intuitive songwriters working today, with a fluent blend of baroque and vernacular. And although he’s capable of more, he sings in cool staccato phrases, preferring to pepper a smooth track rather than smear himself atop it. Those skills give this album rigor, from the sinuous Only Right to the woozy hit Blase (featuring Future and Rae Sremmurd) to the wistful, salacious Horses in the Stable to Saved, essentially a sequel to E-40’s Captain Save a Hoe, featuring E-40 himself.
Ty Dolla Sign serves much the same function that R Kelly did in his mid-1990s to mid-2000s peak, making hip-hop carnality and attitude central to R&B (which is already plenty moist without him). But Kelly was vital — in that era, R&B wasn’t yet a hip-hop footnote. Ty Dolla Sign is in part a victim of his time. His years of collaboration have led him to perhaps think too hard about how he plays with others, and there are moments on this album where he moves himself to the fringes of his own songs.
He manages to outmaneuver Fetty Wap on the brash When I See Ya, and on Know Ya, he keeps the thirsty Trey Songz at bay. But the most meaningful collaborations here are with TC, Ty Dolla Sign’s younger brother and this album’s namesake, who is incarcerated. That’s him on those jailhouse phone calls, and that’s him singing on Miracle/Wherever, an earnest eight-minute homily that arrives halfway through this album. It’s a lavish, unexpected gesture on a record full of them.
— JON CARAMANICA,NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
Aria
Sullivan Fortner
Impulse!
There’s an oddly familiar glow to Aria, the auspicious debut album by pianist Sullivan Fortner. If your memory of brightly swinging major-label jazz recordings extends back at least 20 years (honestly, the last time there was infrastructure for such a thing), you might recognize some parallels, like the ratio of originals to standards, and the air of crisp assurance.
Don’t hold any of this against Fortner, who at 28 has worked broadly and persuasively in bands led by vibraphonist Stefon Harris and trumpeters Roy Hargrove and Etienne Charles, among others. In March, he won the Cole Porter Fellowship in Jazz, a prestigious piano competition judged by a panel of his elders. His fundamentals as a player could hardly be stronger, and his instincts as a composer and bandleader are almost startlingly mature.
His quartet on Aria features Tivon Pennicott on tenor and soprano saxophones, Aidan Carroll on bass and Joe Dyson on drums. The rhythmic brio and harmonic insight in the band can be heard all over the album, but especially on Passepied and Parade, two of Fortner’s more intricate compositions, which variously draw from Baroque forms and the processional cadence of New Orleans, his hometown.
Fortner bookends Aria with its title track and a piece titled Finale, both adapted from a suite commissioned by the Jazz Gallery. He offers a syncopated funk arrangement of I Mean You, by Thelonious Monk, and a chiming reharmonization of You Are Special, a waltz from the children’s show Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. What’s missing are the swelling rock dynamics and hip-hop beat-geekery that have become their own form of orthodoxy among heralded young musicians in the modern jazz mainstream. That isn’t a bad thing.
Still, the album feels buttoned-up, which may be a byproduct of the three veteran producers who helped in its creation. Fortner could do a lot worse than to make an album that evokes predecessors like Rodney Kendrick and Eric Reed. But there’s evidence here of an artist with his own distinct style.
— NATE CHINEN, NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
Aquaria
Boots
Columbia
Catastrophe and death loom throughout Aquaria, the debut album by Boots, aka songwriter, singer, rapper, instrumentalist and producer Jordy Asher. Its songs have titles like Bombs Away, Earthquake, Gallows and Dead Come Running and lyrics full of rubble, tombs and broken glass. The first words Boots offers on the album, in Brooklyn Gamma, are “It ain’t as good as it gets/if you got holes all over your chest.”
His music, mostly his own instruments, provides a post-apocalyptic soundscape that’s simultaneously desolate and pressured. In something like a half-remembered, chromatically deformed doo-wop ballad, Only (one of two songs that also appeared on his Motorcycle Jesus EP this year), the tune might almost be consoling if Boots weren’t singing, “I am the only one alive.”
Boots has produced and written songs with Beyonce and FKA twigs. The beats he builds are low and asymmetrical. But his own songs lean less toward R&B than a broadly defined rock that holds glimpses of the Beatles, Can, Nine Inch Nails, Public Image Ltd and Radiohead alongside P-Funk, Prince and Outkast. He delivers rhymes as haggard chants, then rises above them to sing in a voice that sounds sleepless and anxious, constantly looking over his shoulder.
As a producer, Boots set himself a rigorous limitation on Aquaria. There are no more than three instruments heard simultaneously anywhere in the album (although he freely overdubs vocal harmonies). That’s usually a beat, a riff and something for texture: a guitar or a keyboard that drops out when something else arrives. Yet with distortion and reverb applied, three instruments are more than enough to make each song tense and saturated, as if the music is constantly closing in on the singer.
The narratives of each song are fractured and inconclusive, but Aquaria elapses as an album with a sustained atmosphere of dread, determination and experiment. In the album’s closing song, Boots asks, “Don’t you want to lose it all?”
— JON PARELES, NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
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