Reference Vocal

L'arbre de mai (The Tree of May) is a terrifically presented album of early Renaissance music, one that tries to place the listener inside the musical culture of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries and does a highly imaginative – sometimes overactively imaginative – job of it. The album divides its 19 works into four thematic groups: Love and Youth, the Tree of May, War and the King, and the Evening of Life. Within each group, works by high-Netherlandish composers like Dufay and Compère are mixed with anonymous works of a more popular quality, and vocal works alternate with instrumental dances.

This album compares hits from the Renaissance (by Rore, Lasso, Arcadelt and others) with their instrumental ornamented arrangement published in 1591 by Venetian Giovanni Bassano, author of a reference treatise on arrangement. It also includes some Paladino transcriptions for solo lute, performed by Anthony Bailes.

For only the second time in her career, jazz pianist and vocalist Diana Krall deviates from her tried, true m.o. of covering easily identifiable jazz standards. On Glad Rag Doll she teams with producer T-Bone Burnett and his stable of studio aces. Here the two-time Grammy winner covers mostly vaudeville and jazz tunes written in the 1920s and '30s, some relatively obscure. Most of the music here is from her father's collection of 78-rpm records. Krall picked 35 tunes from that music library and gave sheet music to Burnett.

The Antoniana Library in Padua holds a manuscript called Cantate alla virtù della Signora Maria Pignatelli. A true vocal anthology of the early 18th century, this period canzoniere contains forty-eight secular cantatas, almost all unpublished, by seventeen composers from the great artistic centres that Italy had around 1700: Rome and the Papal States (Bologna, Ferrara, Ravenna), the Duchy of Milan, Naples, the Kingdom of Sicily, and Venice.

Patty Waters is a living legend and every record with her voice is, in consequence, a preciosity. Unanimously considered the main singer of the free jazz tendency since the release of her historical ESP-Disk albums “Sings” and ‘College Tour” in the Sixties, and widely known (Diamanda Galas and Patti Smith pointed her as their main reference) for her impressive interpretation of the traditional “Black is the Color (of My True Love’s Hair)”, her influence resisted to a 30 years disappearance from the stages and the studios. The return happened in 1996, but only to a couple more albums and a few concerts. “An Evening in Houston” marks Waters re-encounter with pianist Burton Greene in a 2018 special gig, along with the greats Mario Pavone and Barry Altschul.

The name of Charles Tournemire is a minor one, even in the history of French music, and you won’t find much about him in the standard reference books. Nor are you likely to get a great deal of opportunity to hear his music: only two of the works on this disc have been published in printed form, and Sagesse is the only one to have been recorded before. The disc would thus be valuable for that reason alone.

Where Are You? is perfect in every sense. Recorded when Frank Sinatra was 42, the torch album finds him in impeccable voice and spirit. The dozen tracks fit together as a unified whole; it’s difficult to imagine one song missing, or another added. Arranger Gordon Jenkins reads Sinatra’s mind, affording him with lush arrangements that break hearts and underscore deliberation. Topping it off, Sinatra’s interpretive skills utterly astonish. Genres aside, this 1957 Capitol classic is inarguably one of the ten-best vocal pop efforts made in the 1950s.
While not as known as Only the Lonely, Where Are You? is its creative equivalent, a poignant masterwork on which Sinatra reflects on what could have been, ponders life’s deep questions, elicits sympathy via romantic distress, and does whatever it takes to get through the night…

Where Are You? is perfect in every sense. Recorded when Frank Sinatra was 42, the torch album finds him in impeccable voice and spirit. The dozen tracks fit together as a unified whole; it’s difficult to imagine one song missing, or another added. Arranger Gordon Jenkins reads Sinatra’s mind, affording him with lush arrangements that break hearts and underscore deliberation. Topping it off, Sinatra’s interpretive skills utterly astonish. Genres aside, this 1957 Capitol classic is inarguably one of the ten-best vocal pop efforts made in the 1950s.
While not as known as Only the Lonely, Where Are You? is its creative equivalent, a poignant masterwork on which Sinatra reflects on what could have been, ponders life’s deep questions, elicits sympathy via romantic distress, and does whatever it takes to get through the night…

West coast composer, artist, and producer Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith has chartered a pioneering career with multiple critically-acclaimed albums since 2015. Following the release of The Kid in 2017, Smith focused her energy in several directions. She founded Touchtheplants, a multidisciplinary creative environment for projects including the first volumes in her instrumental Electronic Series and pocket-sized poetry books on the practice of listening within. She's continued to explore the endless possibilities of electronic instruments as well as the shapes, movements, and expressions found in the physical body's relationship to sound and color. It is this life-guiding interest that forms the foundational frequencies of her latest full-length, The Mosaic of Transformation, a bright, sensorial glide through unbound wave phenomena and the radiant power discovered within oneself.