Monthly Archives: September 2017

PREVIEW: Cécile McLorin-Salvant Soars at the Village Vanguard

Michael J. Agovino for THE VILLAGE VOICE – Last September, as Cécile McLorin Salvant prepared to take the stage of the Village Vanguard with her trio for the last night in a vaunted Tuesday-through-Sunday run at the jazz mecca, her drummer, Lawrence Leathers, gave a pep talk. By Salvant’s own admission, the first five nights were merely OK. Now, as Salvant huddled in the club’s claustrophobic kitchen-turned-dressing room with Lawrence, pianist Aaron Diehl, and bassist Paul Sikivie, it was time to step up.

“He was like, ‘Guys, we’ve got to do this, I don’t know what’s wrong with everyone!’ ” she says, over a glass of Chardonnay on the Lower East Side. “I’m making it the clean version, but some words were said.”

Suitably amped up, the group then went out and worked their way through a set of standards that make up the bulk of Salvant’s rollicking new double album, Dreams and Daggers (out September 29). “It was fine,” she said of those first five nights. “Do you know when you’re like, ‘It’s fine’? You don’t want that. I’d rather it be a train wreck and it has a thing than, ‘It’s fine.’ ”

Whatever Salvant found on that final night, it was more than fine, and this week, beginning Tuesday, September 26, she’s back at the Vanguard with a weeklong headlining slot. “The Vanguard is a character in this story,” the 28-year-old Salvant says of the album. “It’s part of the sound. And the people there — we should have written their names down.

Read the full article on The Village Voice

Cécile McLorin-Salvant on TKA

VIDEO PREMIERE: The Dustbowl Revival’s “If You Could See Me Now”

RELIX – The Dustbowl Revival‘s new self-titled effort debuted in June and the band is today unveiling the official video for the album standout “If You Could See Me Now,” one of the album’s opening tracks along with “Call My Name.”

“When we began brainstorming ideas for the video we wanted to turn the lyric on it’s head a bit – making it less about overcoming a failed past relationship and more about how powerful and grateful you are to have gotten to where you are in life right now,” Zachary Lupetin told Relix.

Lupetin’s bandmate Liz Beebe expanded on the tune, noting that this was the first song she’s written for Dustbowl “that didn’t pour out all at once fully formed.” She continued, “I try to operate, perform and write from a very vulnerable and personal space and I don’t have a very thick skin. So, this song was difficult to workshop. I re-worked the lyrics many times. I felt like I had to explain what it was about and defend what it wasn’t about.”

Watch the video on Relix

The Dustbowl Revival on TKA

FIRST LISTEN: Lizz Wright, ‘Grace’

Jewly Hight for NPR –

On her sixth album, Grace, Lizz Wright translates with phenomenal fluency between inner awareness and outward demonstration, individual seeking and conscious communion, ecstasy and empathy. The achievement’s all the more remarkable when you consider that this 10-song set is the fruit of her will to overcome the alienation she felt from her native region in this distressingly divided political climate. Before completing the album with producer Joe Henry, she took a road trip through the rural South, reacquainting herself with the people and places she came from.

She told me that there was an urgency to the journey: “I need to remember what I know to be my home …and the way people relate and the way Southern people work, the way they cooperate, the way they’re in tune with the earth. I need to study that right now for my own well-being, because I know the truth. I know my life.”

Stream Grace and read the full review on NPR

Lizz Wright at TKA

REVIEW: Lizz Wright’s ‘Grace,’ an Ode to the South and to Forgiveness

Giovanni Russonello for THE NEW YORK TIMES –

The sensual and the spiritual have always been at play in the vocalist Lizz Wright’s music. On her new album, Grace, she adds to the scrum, mixing the sanctified with the political, the sexual with the social.

Cortez Franklin’s classic “Seems I’m Never Tired of Loving You,” taken at a slow, end-of-the-workday tromp, becomes a testimony of wearied patriotism. The title track, written by Rose Cousins as a torch song, is rendered here as a plea for collective ablution.

Ms. Wright recorded the album soon after last year’s presidential election. What had been planned as an ode to the American South became a declaration of redoubled faith, haunted by disappointment but not disillusion. “Grace” seems to draw its energy straight from the soil, with acoustic and electric guitars, organ and piano locked in an earthy symbiosis.

“Through this project, I really was sharing the same thing that I needed to remember myself,” Ms. Wright said in a phone interview. “I wanted to capture the sweetness of the South, and of my coming from it, and my experience of it.”

Read the full review on The New York Times

Lizz Wright at TKA