The Culture 15 September 2024

Let's Walk is the ninth album by Madeleine Peyroux. On her previous outings, she recorded covers of jazz and Great American Songbook standards and works of contemporary songwriters. While she's often co-written songs with her collaborators, Let's Walk is entirely composed of her written originals, which offer excellent lyrics as she continues to mine jazz, blues, and folk. Longtime guitarist Jon Herrington wrote the charts. He plays several instruments, as does pianist Andy Ezrin; also in her band are bassist Paul Frazier and drummer/percussionist Graham Hawthorne. Peyroux also recruited a top-shelf backing chorus: Catherine Russell, Cindy Mizelle, and Keith Fluitt. Peyroux's writing here is often topical, clever, and thornily humorous. During the pandemic she read the writings of James Baldwin, W.E.B. Dubois, Cornel West, all of whom inspired her.

Let's Walk is the ninth album by Madeleine Peyroux. On her previous outings, she recorded covers of jazz and Great American Songbook standards and works of contemporary songwriters. While she's often co-written songs with her collaborators, Let's Walk is entirely composed of her written originals, which offer excellent lyrics as she continues to mine jazz, blues, and folk. Longtime guitarist Jon Herrington wrote the charts. He plays several instruments, as does pianist Andy Ezrin; also in her band are bassist Paul Frazier and drummer/percussionist Graham Hawthorne. Peyroux also recruited a top-shelf backing chorus: Catherine Russell, Cindy Mizelle, and Keith Fluitt. Peyroux's writing here is often topical, clever, and thornily humorous. During the pandemic she read the writings of James Baldwin, W.E.B. Dubois, Cornel West, all of whom inspired her.

Sacred Spirit is a musical project by Claus Zundel, Ralf Hamm, and Markus Staab.
Musicians have made astonishing leaps of the imagination in recent years in fusing often contradictory music - Celtic with African, reggae with Bhangra. Sacred Spirit Volume 2: Culture Clash is an album that attempts the audacious: to combine the raw essence of the blues with the sophisticated orchestral structures of classical music, and then to underpin the two with contemporary rhythms.

Sacred Spirit is a musical project by Claus Zundel, Ralf Hamm, and Markus Staab.
Musicians have made astonishing leaps of the imagination in recent years in fusing often contradictory music - Celtic with African, reggae with Bhangra. Sacred Spirit Volume 2: Culture Clash is an album that attempts the audacious: to combine the raw essence of the blues with the sophisticated orchestral structures of classical music, and then to underpin the two with contemporary rhythms.