Speak Low (Enja)
Lucia Cadotsch
Released February 19, 2017
DownBeat Five-Star Review
YouTube:
https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_nsu-TlkCunj6nZ5SgPZtiPtLt8VaapbVU
Spotify:
https://open.spotify.com/album/4GfbsDF5VHv8mexwILbXnm?si=R1nYErKuSSWX38MMbNTSwg
About:
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: double bass
Recorded August 17t – 19 2015, at Rec Publica, Lubrza, Poland
Recorded, Mixed and Mastered by Klaus Scheuermann
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)
