(Reprinted from the July 2020 issue of New York City Jazz Record)
Singer/composer/director Sara Serpa’s silken voice stands in contrast to the theme of her June release Recognition: Music for a Silent Film (Biophilia Records). The album, the soundtrack from Serpa’s affecting 2017 multi-media project, Recognition, takes to task 500 years of colonial abuses that her native Portugal perpetrated against the black citizens of Angola. The film portion of the project—the entirety of which is available on Serpa’s website—comprises actual footage of 1960s Angola from a family archive.
Throughout the footage of bombings and military parades, Serpa interspersed text from the writings of Amílcar Cabral, the anti-colonial thinker credited with overthrowing Portuguese dominance in the African colonies. The relevance of these provocative texts to the legacy of African slavery in modern-day America is hard to miss, and Serpa’s disturbing images alongside these textual overlays have only become more distressing in the few years since she first debuted the project. Without these additional media, however, her music takes on a wholly different character. What emerges from the audio-only experience of the album is simply the elegance of Serpa’s intervallic vocal lines and the impressionistic interplay of harp (Zeena Parkins), saxophone (Mark Turner), and piano (David Virelles) on tracks like “The Multi-racialism Myth”, “Civilizing Influence”, and “Unity and Struggle”. Thus the album, as a stand-alone, shows how beauty works as a tool of protest.
Banjoist/singer Don Vappie revitalizes a nearly forgotten New Orleans musical tradition on The Blue Book of Storyville (Lejazztel Records), a collection of 17 banjo-centered tunes. Backed by a trio of guitar (Dave Kelbie), bass (Sébastien Girardot), and clarinet (David Horniblow), Vappie champions the Créole contribution to the exquisite blend of ragtime, marches, hymns, and blues that became New Orleans jazz. “I really wanted to advance the banjo in a more melodic role as I perceived it was in some of the Caribbean and African styles”, Vappie explained in the liner notes. With this in mind, he turned out the bawdy, blue-tinged title track, one of four originals on the album; happy jags like the traditional “Mo Pas Laimé Ça”; more well-known tunes like Jelly Roll Morton’s droll “Buddy Bolden’s Blues”; and homages like “C’est L’autre Cancan”, by Créole jazz trombonist Edward "Kid" Ory. In sum, a joyous reminder of New Orleans’ diverse heritage.
Singer/composer Jay Clayton, one of the most imaginative free singers around, excels in small formats, where her roomy, nuanced improvisations can receive the necessary attention. On her latest release for Sunnyside, Alone Together—a duo album with drummer Jerry Granelli, recorded completely extemporaneously—she sings and voices spoken word with only percussion for accompaniment. For source material, Clayton drew on the writings of E. E. Cummings, whose verse inspired the album’s bookends, opening with “Because It’s Spring” and closing with “Bells Too”. The free-form poet’s tantalizing words land in the sweetest part of Clayton’s voice, where the warm lower tones are just beginning to melt into her surprisingly light soprano. This time she also recorded one of her mainstays from Ornette Coleman’s canon: “Lonely Woman,” its solitary melody all the more aching for the lack of chordal backing. And on inventive originals like “Swing Thing” and “New Morning Blues” Clayton used electronic effects in real time to enhance the textures of her wordless vocals—a tricky technique that few do as well.
But Clayton, also a jazz educator, is more than willing to share what she knows—she recently signed on as a coach with www.jazzvoice.org, vocalist Alexis Cole’s new educational site for vocal jazz. Born of lockdown necessity, the site is unusual for the access it gives new singers to A-list jazz vocalists; besides Clayton, interested singers can study privately with the likes of Karrin Allyson, Paul Jost, Jane Monheit, and Tierney Sutton, among equally impressive others. Subscribers can participate in master classes with pros like John Proulx and Catherine Russell, and free-access educational videos can help aspirants understand how jazz singers approach feel, vibrato, and scatting.