Jazz Female

Hailed by Jazziz magazine as the "voice of her generation" and a "national treasure," Chicago-born, Durham, North Carolina-based Dr Lenora Zenzalai Helm is a jazz vocal musician, composer, lyricist, bandleader, and a dedicated educator at North Carolina Central University (NCCU). Helm encompasses all of the inventions and dimensions of jazz and the African Diaspora on her new recording, Journeywoman, featuring her Tribe Jazz Orchestra Nonet. Helm's new CD, her eighth as a leader, is a compelling 65-minute, multi-movement 12-track work, where she sings about the life of an allegorical woman named Journey, and her struggles with abuse, birth, death, self-definition and her victories through self-love, perseverance, and affirmation.

As the name implies, the album features old music, mainly compositions from the Renaissance and Baroque eras, which in the warm but unconventional embrace of this unique band receive a new, significantly different interpretations from the traditional. The backgrounds of the musicians range from jazz music to baroque, Argentine tango to contemporary music, improvisation and all kinds of experimentation. This has made the collaboration of the quartet a real exploration during its six-year history.

Waterloo, Dancing Queen or Voulez-vous. Famous, perhaps even played a bit too frequently. But what about Waterloo as a jazz ballad or Money, Money, Money in swing?

Recorded in 1985 after a break from recording and time spent living in Barbados and Liberia, Nina’s Back features a rejuvenated Nina Simone reaching out to a wider musical audience. Featuring a number of memorable Simone compositions, the band includes horns and backup singers for a unique recording in Nina’s catalog.

The Norwegian trio GURLS – tenor sax player Hanna Paulsberg, bassist Ellen Andrea Wang and lead vocalist Rohey Taalah, made quite a noise with the cheeky, feminine songs of its debut album Run Boy, Run (Jazzland, 2018, the record won the Norwegian Grammy, Spellemannprisen for the best jazz record of the year). Four years later Gurls return with a live album, Oui, a new lead vocalist, Marianna Sangita Angeletaki Røe, a few new songs, and new arrangements of the not-so-old songs, together with the Trondheim Jazz Orchestra (TJO).

'Too Hot For Words' blends the tight-knit swing of the Metropolitan Jazz Octet with the unerring musicianship of Dee Alexander to mark the 60th anniversary of Billie Holiday's departure from the planet, mixing Holiday classics with some of Lady Day's lesser- known repertoire. The arrangements sparkle, and Alexander shines as bright as ever. But at no point does she attempt to mimic Holiday. (What would be the point of that)? And the arrangements don't try to imitate the little 'orchestras' that accompanied Holiday's greatest recordings. (No point in that either.) These new settings respect the songs, but reframe them for our era. The album becomes a sort of telescoping time capsule: sterling musicians of the 21st century, building upon an octet sound crafted 50 years earlier, revitalizing songs that Holiday began recording in the 1930s.