Category: English pieces (Page 7 of 11)

Funkmaster.

Troy Andrews a.k.a. Trombone Shorty is a real New Orleanian. He grew up in Backatown Tremé and got a music traineeship with brother James, the jazz trumpeter, from his earliest days. A gandson to legendary singer Jesse Hill Troy, Andrews learned to play the drums, the trumpet and the trombone when he was very young.

Now only 24 years old, the trombone player made four jazz CDs between his sixteenth and nineteenth, but spent the years after that playing countless gigs with U2, Green Day, Allen Toussaint, Lenny Kravitz and with his own band, Orleans Avenue.

Andrews, playing the trombone, the trumpet, keyboards, the drums and percussion and sometimes also singing in an expressive and socially conscious way, is backed intensely swingingly by Joey Peebles (drums), Dwayne “Big D” Williams (percussion), Mike Ballard (bass), Pete Murano (guitar), Tim McFatter (tenor sax) and Dan Oestreicher (bariton sax).

In thirteen songs of his own plus Toussaint’s On Your Way Down (with the old master on piano) Andrews combines all sorts of influences in the best New Orleans tradition. Continue reading

www.annacoogan.com

Destination.

Anna Coogan’s development into a folky singer-songwriter was long and winding: the American broke off an opera study in Austrian city Salzburg, where she also sang show tunes during recitals to everyone’s bewilderment and sometimes missed classes because she went skiing. She studied biology after that and only started singing (again) after hearing Alison Krauss. Two CD’s with her band north19 scored nicely, but that band fell apart in 2007.

Coogan wrote the eleven songs for her first solo-outing mostly during sleepless nights, visited by doubt and despair. Even in that one up-tempo rocker with merry ooh-la-la refrain she sings how she would prefer to go back to bed to dream about another life.

In her ten other songs she mixes Continue reading

www.johnlestermusic.com

Classy cat.

San Franciscan bassist/guitarist/singer John Lester lived in Paris and London, but settled in Amsterdam after that. There he recorded his eleven new songs for this third CD, but also during sessions in London and Berkeley, California.

Musically Lester exactly stays his course. He merges influences from jazz and singer-songwriter into  infectious, cleverly rounded melodies. Their moody and spacious foundation on acoustic bass and semi-acoustic guitar Continue reading

Balanced emotion.

Krista Detor made an enormous impression with her CDs Mudshow and Cover Their Eyes. Her intimate piano songs proved a huge trump card for Dutch Corazong label. However, in fifteen new songs she confirms and enlarges her reputation as a singer-songwriter in an impressive way.

She grouped her songs ambitiously in groups of three, inspired amongst others by Frederico Garcia Lorca, Dylan Thomas and Charles Darwin. She recorded that last suite in Engeland, when she was invited for the Darwin Song House workshop.

This time too, the songs are musically restrained and melancholical of strucure and contents. Continue reading

Gritty and elegant.

On Cleary’s fourth interim drummer Raymond Weber plays, and not Jeffrey ‘Jellybean’ Alexander, who previously laid down the grooves. Still that is not the biggest difference with the self-titled predecessor, because with Weber, refined in New Orleans, the Gentlemen also drive Cleary forward effortlessly, often with the aid of a percussionist.

In twelve songs the keyboardist/singer unexpectedly mixes the diverse angles of Moonburn, his second album, with his uncompromisingly swinging third, recorded almost live, to a surprising unity.

Cleary and regular producer John Porter do not shun studio effects in that process from time to time. That makes one think of influence Johnny ‘Guitar’ Watson (Agent OO Funk) and even of hiphop beats in Doin Bad Feelin Good, recorded more solo. Continue reading