Lucia Cadotsch
Released February 26, 2017
DownBeat Five-Star Review
YouTube: https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=BkSPJb_YQ3I&list=OLAK5uy_mRO6fZAkViVUWaMSeMFzK8BXMg9T0jLtw
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/album/2qxxTaFfQn1yZsI0jlVPWO?si=FksQIEt-QyOYO2OlLmlG8Q
About:
With a sharp-eared love of the past but a sensibility resolutely of the present, new-era jazz singer Lucia Cadotsch’s trio “Speak Low” – featuring tenor saxophonist Otis Sandsjö and double-bassist Petter Eldh – reanimates songs long seemingly set in amber. Hailing from their adopted home of Berlin, Germany – the 21st-century culture capital of Europe – these three musicians come at the Great American Songbook from a European angle, their “retro-futurist” sound as informed by remix culture and free jazz as by their appreciation for classic vocal records.
Reviewing the group’s eponymous debut album of 2016, Speak Low (Yellow Bird/Enja), The Guardian declared: “Remember the name Lucia Cadotsch – you’re going to be hearing a lot of it,” adding: “Cadotsch is a young, Zurich-born vocalist who possesses a classical clarity, a folk singer’s simplicity and an appetite for performing very famous songs (‘Moon River,’ ‘Don’t Explain,’ ‘Strange Fruit’) in the company of two edgy free-jazz instrumentalists, who flank her sedate progress with split-note sax sounds and spiky basslines with percussive strumming. In this compelling trio’s hands, the process is remarkably melodious and illuminating… It’s all eerily beautiful.”
Along with glowing reviews, Lucia won the 2017 Echo Jazz Prize – the German equivalent of a Grammy Award – for Best Vocalist of the Year for Speak Low. She and her Swedish friends Otis and Petter bring the bittersweet repertoire of Billie Holiday, Nina Simone, Abbey Lincoln and Dinah Washington vividly alive for a new generation of listeners, as well as for veteran music lovers in search of fresh treatments of these timeless songs. Profiled in DownBeat magazine, Lucia explained the individualistic approach she takes with the trio: “I want to be subtle and melodic in my phrasing, but I also need roughness and intensity in music. Otis and Petter say in the songs what I don’t say myself. While I’m the still center, they can storm around me.” Alluding to the act of stripping nostalgia from this repertoire, Otis added: “Our common unsentimental approach to these melodies takes away the glossiness that these beautiful songs can often get stuck in.” Discussing their arrangements, Lucia said: “What we do is like sampling culture in hip-hop. We might quote a detail from an old recording, but change the register and tempo and then loop it into our arrangement organically.”
The trio arranges its songs together, often inspired by obscure details from vintage records. As DownBeat noted, they turn a high-register clarinet part in “Deep Song” from a Billie Holiday LP into a bass line; they echo an intro improv seen in a live Nina Simone video of “Ain’t Got No” in their arrangement; they repurpose a marimba line in Johnny Hartman’s version of “Slow, Hot Wind” as an outro hymn melody. German magazine Jazzpodium described these reinventions as “like a musical night trip… urban, with an analog directness and a sheer boundless freedom in its approach to interpretation and sound.” And the DownBeat double review of Speak Low and its remix-album follow-up, Speak Low Renditions, hailed the trio’s creative approach overall: “Such is the spell that Cadotsch, Sandsjö and Eldh cast that it can make one feel that this is the only way age-old standards should be approached: not slavishly but fearlessly, with an unfettered imagination approaching that of the songs’ originators.”
The trio’s distinctive black-and-white videos for Speak Low have a European art-house feel, as with the official album trailer here. There is also a gorgeous one-shot music video for “Slow Hot Wind” as well as live videos for “Speak Low” and “Strange Fruit” / “Ain’t Got No” among others. Touching upon their European roots, Lucia, Otis & Petter have lately added to their live repertoire an arrangement by the great Italian modernist Luciano Berio of the Anglo-American folk song “Black Is the Color of My True Love’s Hair,” as well as an English translation of the dark “Ballad of the Drowned Girl” by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht. About the storytelling resonance of old songs, whether sung by Lotte Lenya or Billie Holiday, Lucia concludes: “Times change, but humans don’t seem to, for better and worse.”
Petter wrote a poem adorning the sleeve of Speak Low that also sets the scene for what New York concertgoers will experience upon the trio’s maiden voyage to America:
It was a different world back then.
There was a time
before you could amplify sound with electricity,
before you could accumulate sound in plastic
and bring it from one corner of Tellus to another.
This is the remix. Keeping it simple and raw.
Three voices stubbornly creating the core of all music;
Rhythm!
Candles still flicker, the frequencies of yesterday still resonate. This is acoustic retro-futurism!
Track Listing:
1. Slow Hot Wind (Henry Mancini, Norman Gimbel) 4:42
2. Speak Low (Kurt Weill, Ogden Nash) 5:18
3. Strange Fruit (Galt MacDermot, Gerome Ragni, James Rado) 7:00
4. Ain’t Got No, I Got Life (Lewis Allen) 4:28
5. Don’t Explain (Arthur Herzog Jr., Billie Holiday) 4:26
6. Deep Song (Arthur Herzog Jr., Irene Kitchings) 3:59
7. Some Other Spring (Ann Ronell) 3:16
8. Willow Weep for Me (Laszlo Javór, Rezso Seress, Sam Lewis) 4:42
9. Gloomy Sunday (Henry Mancini, Johnny Mercer) 4:49
Personnel:
Lucia Cadotsch: voice
Otis Sandsjö: tenor saxophone
Petter Eldh: doublebass
Recorded August 17 – 19, 2015, at Rec Publica, Lubrza, Poland,
Recorded, Mixed and Mastered by Klaus Scheuermann at 4Ohm Music, Berlin
Photos by Michael Jungblut
Design by Manon Kahle
Review:
So ingenious is the way vocalist Lucia Cadotsch reimagines the canon of standards that the songs feel fully in the here and now, with zero hint of faded lounge-act nostalgia. The singer, a 33-year-old Zurich native living in Berlin, has accomplished this in a deeply integrated partnership with two free-jazz players, Otis Sandsjö on tenor saxophone and Petter Eldh on bass. The subtly intense swirl of the instrumentalists—Sandsjö’s multiphonic effects, Eldh’s visceral thrum—helps reinvest such songs as “Don’t Explain” and “Strange Fruit” with tension and truth. For all its Northern European cool, Cadotsch’s singing has an intensity of its own. Her tone is deceptively neutral, with lightly accented English, but she cuts to the heart of these songs from another angle, with an almost classical purity of intonation and a serene sense of rhythm. She has internalized the jazz message of vintage Billie Holiday—the hand-inglove fit with her players, an artful sense of the bittersweet—without aping timbre or phrasing. And Cadotsch reinvents “Willow Weep For Me” beautifully, embroidering fresh melody into a new intro and coda. The title track has the air of real life to it, with Cadotsch’s fetching vocal interrupted by a saxophone solo that fumes and subsides like a lover’s spat. The typically striking arrangement of “Moon River” gives the song as much grit as glow, a sweet tune turned into a tone poem. And for those who know Henry Mancini’s “Slow, Hot Wind” via Sarah Vaughan or Johnny Hartman, Cadotsch and company deliver a different experience, sultry but also dramatic. Sandsjö’s circular breathing sounds like a summer squall on the way, as Cadotsch makes the most of the alluring melody. The companion release Speak Low Renditions presents the recordings as digitally sliced and diced by various remixers, setting the original performances among beats and atmospheres. The new mix of “Some Other Spring” adds the skittering live drums of Tilo Weber, while other tracks are recast as floating grooves or glitchy abstractions; some sound as if the original record were coming through a static-laced, in-and-out shortwave broadcast, a pleasantly disorienting effect. Such is the spell that Cadotsch, Sandsjö and Eldh cast on these albums that it can make one feel that this is the only way age-old standards should be approached: not slavishly but fearlessly, with an unfettered imagination approaching that of the songs’ originators.
Bradley Bambarger (DownBeat)
