Mwaliko is West African guitarist Lionel Loueke’s second album for Blue Note. Originally planned as a series of duets, it ultimately became one of duets and trios, in order to to showcase the collective talents of Gilfema, his touring band with bassist Massimo Biolcati and drummer Ferenc Nemeth. The…
Karibu is West African guitarist and vocalist Lionel Loueke’s debut album for the Blue Note label, and his fourth overall. Loueke is best known to America’s audiences as a sideman in Herbie Hancock’s quartet, and for his stellar 2006 offering Virgin Forest on the wonderful ObliqSound imprint. Fans of…
The very title of Interpreting the Masters suggests that the Bird & the Bee are digging into a catalog of a widely respected pop songwriter — a Burt Bacharach, perhaps, or a Jimmy Webb. That’s not the case: children of the ‘80s that they are, singer Inara George and producer Greg Kurstin have chosen Daryl Hall & John Oates for the…
The Bird and the Bee emerged from their retro nest in 2006, flaunting a sort of contemporary space-age pop that relied on Inara George‘s voice — a jazzy, soft soprano in the vein of Norah Jones and Priscilla Ahn — and Greg Kurstin‘s production chops. The combination celebrated outmoded genres without losing…
As a label, Blue Note has been changing its focus, drifting closer and closer to mainstream pop material — not that there’s anything wrong with this, but it is a bit of a shock that the name label in jazz since 1939 is looking for hits with Elisabeth Withers and a…
Please Clap Your Hands arrives just nine months after the duo’s full-length debut, but the Bird and the Bee have already widened their aviary considerably. Taking a cue from “F*cking Boyfriend,” whose breezily crisp rhythms sat atop the Billboard Club Play charts for weeks in 2006, Hands quickens the pace by adding more dance…
There’s no denying Priscilla Ahn’s voice. Crystalline and pitch-perfect, it’s the sort of classic-sounding soprano that belongs to an earlier decade, when folksingers wore flowers in their hair and sang songs about free love. Ahn is the product of a more current generation, but she fills her second album…
When she wants to sing jazz, Dianne Reeves has always had the ability to reach the top of her field, but she has long seemed unable to make up her mind between jazz, R&B, world music, and pop. This Blue Note disc fortunately finds her mostly sticking to jazz…
Led by “Better Days,” a huge hit, Dianne Reeves’ self-titled album from 1987 was produced by George Duke and accordingly fluctuates between R&B and jazz. ~ Ron Wynn
Although pianist Chucho Valdés starts things off with a precise and danceable interpretation of Ernesto Lecuona’s “La Comparsa” on New Conceptions, the classical and operatic themes explored on 2002’s Fantasia Cubana: Variations on Classical Themes are largely implied this time around. Valdés is a superb classically trained technician with…