Sylvia McNair has won two Grammy Awards, and is today’s leading interpreter of American Popular Song. After a thriving opera career, she recorded several albums, including her award winning albums with pianist Andre Previn. This programme includes a mix of new and old standards, such as Orange Colored Sky, Love Is In The Air, Summertime, and One Hundred Easy Ways. Jazz musicians Ted Taylor, Jeremy Allen, and Steve Houghton accompany McNair for this recording.
The late, great Dave Brubeck surely would appreciate this album, which is a tribute to the legacy of jazz giant. Sabine Kuhlich and Laia Genc have chosen some of Brubeck’s greatest work to cover, including possibly his most well-known pieces, Unsquare Dance and Take Five. Vocalist and saxophonist Sabine Kuhlich has studied jazz in New York City as well as Amsterdam. She is also a passionate composer, and an incredible arranger. She has been teacher of the Jazz Department at the Conservatory Maastricht since 2006. Laia Genc is a modern jazz pianist also based in Germany. She performs frequently with Blue Art Orchestra and Miss Jones Big Band, and is active at jazz festivals across Europe.
Maria Mendes: Saudade, Colour of Love / Beasley, Metropole Orkest
Challenge Records
CD
$9.49$18.99Save 50%Oct 07, 2022
The GRAMMY Award Winner Metropole Orchestra, GRAMMY Award Winner John Beasley, and GRAMMY Award Nominee Maria Mendes present a new live recording. Fado music is undeniable for the Portuguese people and for all of those who seek for nostalgic love in the past and present. And so is saudade – a Portuguese word that doesn’t translate to any other language in the world.
"Fado and saudade are forever bound. They both express the melancholic longing for the past and the hopes it becomes present once again. They also express the belief in destiny as a fortunate and fatalistic power that you cannot escape from. This music is about how I feel Fado and how I love it, free of definitions, free of limitations. This is no Fado album. This is no traditional Jazz music. This is an adventure that is real and can be felt by everyone. As love is." --Maria Mendes
Editor's Choice at Jazziz October 2022
REVIEWS
With her critically acclaimed 2019 album Close To Me, Mendes spotlighted her ability to bring disparate influences together with her vibrant fusion of symphonic jazz and Portuguese Fado, the folk music of her homeland. Now, Mendes brings her singular vision to the concert stage in collaboration with master keyboardist-arranger John Beasley and Metropole Orkest on her new live album, Saudade, Colour Of Love...the album expands the emotional intensity of its predecessor’s hybrid sound with the backing of a full orchestra. The lush symphonic sound sparks when it meets the interplay of Mendes’ brilliant quartet and the singer’s fervent vocals.
--DownBeat
Drawing songs from her Grammy-nominated album Close to You and adding new material, Mendes and producer, co-arranger and conductor John Beasley get the balance just right: Sinatra-esque orchestral introductions, rippling jazz piano, the melancholy drama of fado, her own forays into scat and improvisation. Check out the epic “Verdes Anos,” which starts with soft strings, moves into a fiery piano solo, and ends with the Orkest doing battle with Mendes’ high-pitched cries and squeals. “E Se Não For Fado” fits squarely in the ballad tradition, keeping the improvisation to a minimum to make the most of its lovely melody.
Mendes soars as both singer and scatter on her own “Dança Do Amor,” while “Quando Eu Era Pequenina” takes a traditional Portuguese tune and sends it into orbit. Beloved Brazilian composer Hermeto Pascoal contributes a brand-new piece to the program, and “Hermeto’s Fado For Maria” ends up as a highlight of the record. Mendes closes the album with “Meu Pobre Capitão,” a new co-composition with Beasley whose creamy melody and Latin shuffle send the audience out smiling. Pulling from two different traditions on Saudade, Mendes manages to make a new one of her own.
--The Big Takeover
There are few things as exciting and as challenging as singing with a full orchestra. Maria Mendes has a voice, toned by technique and colored with emotion, that soars like another instrument atop the awesome arrangements of the Metropole Orkest conducted by John Beasley.
[Mendes] offers us Portuguese Folk songs, colorfully arranged and plush with orchestration. The mastery of John Beasley as arranger and conductor shines like gold. This project is Maria Mendes’ dream-come-true album, recorded, May of 2022 in Amsterdam. Her voice is as natural and multi-layered as the orchestra and her exquisite range soars above the instruments like a powerful bird in flight. Maria’s range is astounding and the way she weaves jazzy scat sounds into the production is both unique and ear-catching. John Beasley builds the production around her vocals beautifully, attentive to the details of her delivery, while all the time, enriching this amazing orchestra with his sensitive, dynamic arrangements.
Here is an artistic and unusual project, infused with jazz, rich with classical overtones and culturally prominent.
Sharon Paige broke into show business in her teens as a singing and dancing chorus girl and moved quickly to featured roles. She has traveled throughout the United States and Canada, performing in the national companies of Broadway and Off Broadway musicals. Sharon has also toured the summer-tent, dinner-theater and nightclub circuits. In 2008, she and Keith Ingham released their Ned Washington tribute album, Love Is the Thing; Burke Beautiful is their second collaboration. Sharon currently resides and sings in New York City. Keith Ingham has recorded extensively and worked with Benny Goodman and other bands. He wrote the arrangements and led an all-star group of musicians on three notable Maxine Sullivan recordings for Harbinger Records. The first, “Maxine Sullivan Sings Great Songs from the Cotton Club by Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler,” was nominated for a Grammy Award. He and Maxine also collaborate on Harbinger albums devoted to the music of Jule Styne and burton Lane. Keith was also arranger and leader on the classic Peggy Lee recording, “Love Held Lightly,” also for Harbinger Records. Johnny Burke was one of America’s greatest composer/lyricists. He enjoyed a long collaboration with James V. Monaco and then Jimmy McHugh writing songs for films, shows, and such singers as Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra.
"Our new album In Between is a homage to those intermediate states, those moments of laughter and crying in which music stands against the rational order of our daily life and makes room for our souls.” Singer Juliana Blumenschein and guitarist Florin Küppers are musical storytellers. On In Between they tell stories situated between North and South America, more precisely from the Great American Songbook to the sambas and bossa novas of Brazil.
THE CELEBRATED PIANIST JACKY TERRASSON, HAILED BY THE NEW YORK TIMES AS "ONE OF THE THIRTY ARTISTS POISED TO SHAPE THE TRAJECTORY OF AMERICAN CULTURE," UNVEILS "MOVING ON". BACK IN FRANCE AFTER THREE DECADES IN NEW YORK, HE ORGANIZES A DOUBLE NATIONALITY TREASURE HUNT, MIXING CHOPIN AND JAZZ, WITH GUEST ARTISTS SUCH AS KAREEN GUIOCK-THURAM, CAMILLE BERTAULT AND GRÉGOIRE MARET. WITH A NEW-FOUND JOIE DE VIVRE, EACH PIECE TELLS AN ADVENTURE, A STORY, A DELICATE CELEBRATION OF HAPPINESS.
Introduced in The New York Times in 1994 as "one of the thirty artists poised to shape the trajectory of American culture in the following three decades," pianist Jacky Terrasson has lived up to this acclaim by becoming the most widely heard French jazz musician on digital platforms. Born in Berlin in 1965 to an American mother and a French father, he pursued studies in classical piano in France before enrolling at the Berklee College of Music. In 1993, he clinched the prestigious Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz International Piano Competition.
He began his career alongside luminaries such as Betty Carter, Dee Dee Bridgewater, Cassandra Wilson, Charles Aznavour, Guy Lafitte, Barney Wilen, and Ray Brown. Terrasson made his mark. Signing with the legendary Blue Note label under the stewardship of its iconic president, Bruce Lundvall, he embarked on a remarkable 25-year journey of success. An indefatigable globetrotter, he graces the stages of the most illustrious jazz and piano festivals across Europe, the United States, South America, and Asia.
"Moving On," the title of Jacky Terrasson’s new album perfectly sums up the new aspirations "of the most traveling of jazz pianists, a pianist of happiness" (Telerama). After being the muse of the majors (Blue Note & Universal), it is a new adventure as an artist producer and a new path that Jacky Terrasson decided to begin by creating his own label (Earth Sounds). It is also, after 30 years spent in New York, his choice to live again in France, the country where he grew up. But also continue to play regularly on the American continent, a subtle treasure hunt between leaving and returning to the two countries of his dual nationality. It also means offering two trio recording sessions (in France and New York) for the same record with numerous guests: the singers Kareen Guiock-Thuram and Camille Bertault, the harmonica player Grégoire Maret, and the drummers Billy Hart and Eric Harland. And finally, fully embrace his thirst to bring together a Chopin prelude with a jazz standard (Besame Mucho), to invite a bird recorded in Borneo which becomes a piece (Edit Piaf), to write and compose music for his friends (Are you following me, put into words by Camille Bertault), for his desires (Love Light), his travels (AF 006), and to be happy (Happy by Pharell Williams like a fireworks display almost bringing together all the musicians on the album). Behind each title hides an adventure, a story, depth, and the desire to always want to enjoy life with delicacy.
15 titles, including 8 exclusive to the CD edition.
