Two new releases introduced me to several musicians I had not previously encountered and whose acquaintance I am happy to have made. On The Stereography Project, Vol. 2,* Dutch saxophonist and arranger Marike van Dijk presents the songs and voices of singer/songwriters Jeff Taylor and Katell Keineg in gorgeous arrangements for two pop chamber orchestras. On Blued Dharma,* pianist Adrean Farrugia and saxophonist Joel Frahm, new to me as leaders, offer an accessible and satisfying lesson on jazz duo performance.
Marike van Dijk
The Stereography Project, Vol. 2 (Hert Records)
A review
On The Stereography Project, Vol. 2,* Dutch saxophonist and arranger Marike van Dijk has shaped a group of fascinating jewels with a lapidary’s precision, but where a lapidary slices material away to create reflective facets, van Dijk the arranger adds material in the form of an unconventional chamber orchestra’s instruments. The result is the same: a gem’s brilliant center is revealed and intensified.
Van Dijk’s gems are the songs and voices of singer/songwriters Jeff Taylor and Katell Keineg, whom she selected after a years-long search for the right collaborators through the clubs and lofts and basements of New York City. While neither Taylor nor Keineg enjoys a high level of recognition among the general public, critical acclaim and their recording/touring credits testify to singularly affecting artists who inhabit sui generis musical universes. Taylor has edged further into the limelight recently with his appearance on Donny McCaslin’s Beyond Now album. Keineg, for her part, has not yet found a way to fit herself into a wider audience, but artists such as Iggy Pop, Calexico, and Sinead O’Connor have featured her. Both wear their heart on their voice, though they bring very different vocal qualities to the microphone. Taylor’s voice fills with raw emotionality delivered with urgent intensity, while Keineg connects to deeper feeling with a disarming, diaphanous vocalization. Their songs on this album, for the most part, explore interpersonal relationships of several varieties. Taylor grounds his lyrics in the everyday. Keineg takes a more literary approach that requires unpacking.
The album opens with five of Taylor’s songs, which Van Dijk recorded in New York with a 13-piece orchestra, including Taylor on vocals and guitar. The final six tracks are Keineg’s, recorded in Amsterdam with a different ensemble of 15, including Keineg on vocals and guitar.
Van Dijk reveals an exquisite sensitivity to the material in the musical textures she chooses. She seems to know exactly what combination of timbres, frequencies, and rhythms will best serve and irresistibly communicate a song’s center. You willingly give yourself over to the seductive current of her arrangements, which, as organic as breathing, fulfill the songs in much the same way a successful musical score fulfills a film. The short, sharp cuts of the strings in Taylor’s “Bastard” barely conceal the violence hidden in the song’s opening expression of brotherly love. The warmth of the reeds in Keineg’s “At the Mermaid Parade” cushions the burden of a woman’s siren song.
The Stereography Project, Vol. 2* combines elements of pop, Americana, and chamber music to deliver a compelling collection of songs whose brilliance has been deepened by van Dijk’s masterful and downright beautiful arrangements.
Adrean Farrugia and Joel Frahm
Blued Dharma (GB Records)
A review
Duo recordings present a series of traps for musicians that can produce less-than-successful outcomes: Each pushes his own agenda, and they cannot get in step with one another. They fall into numbing lockstep with one another. They overplay to fill the space. One commands the space to the detriment of the other. And so on. Happily, Blued Dharma* from pianist Adrean Farrugia and saxophonist Joel Frahm falls into none of these traps, instead offering one of the more ebullient and satisfying jazz recordings of 2018 to date.
Maybe it helps that the two have played together for nine years in drummer Ernesto Cervini’s groups. (Indeed, it was on a tour with Cervini when the two were playing together during a sound check that Frahm suggested they make a duo record.) Whatever the explanation, these two melodists speak the same musical language and are each completely comfortable in their own skin and remarkably attuned to one another. Conversations and confluences abound as they push one another playfully into expanding spaces, each sparking ideas off the other as readily as metal on flint.
The program includes five Farrugia compositions and two standards, Oscar Hammerstein/Jerome Kern’s “Nobody but Me” and Ray Noble’s “Cherokee” in two very different versions. (In the second version, oddly titled “Cherokee I,” which starts wistfully before hardening, the two make you hear the head without actually playing it. Neat trick.) Farrugia demonstrates a comfortable range of mood and style in his compositions: playful and spritely on the title track, deeply warm on the homage “For Murray Gold,” soulful on “Gospell,” funky on “Cool Beans,” celebratory on “Half Moon (for Sophia).”
The musicians’ command of their instruments and their attention to detail and one another allow them to communicate with economy and eloquence. There’s serious, sometimes breathtaking music aplenty on Blued Dharma,* but it never takes itself too seriously and is always on the lookout for something to celebrate. It’s an accessible treasure.
* Click on any title’s link to go to the Amazon page where you can purchase it.If you click through and make purchases there, Musically Speaking will receive a small percentage of the sale. Thank you for your support.
© 2018 Mel Minter