Karen Mantler, Business is Bad

Karen Mantler carries with her an originality that reminds me just a little of Bob Dorough. There is a sometimes very dark humor involved, a sensibility that is both playful and insightful, a singer-songwriter with a lyrical and melodic gift. She is the fruitful progeny of Carla Bley and Michael Mantler, and she seems to have imbibed a little of both in her music. Plus she can sing.

All this I know from listening a bunch of times to her new album, Business is Bad (ECM XtraWatt 14 B0021138-02). It's on the surface a simple affair, with Karen on lead vocals, piano, and harmonica; Doug Wieselman on guitar and bass clarinet; and Kato Hideki on bass. They romp through Karen's songs with style and grace.

The songs catch the spirit of our times. People are hungry out there, some people are going through financial nightmares (myself included), we lose loved ones and friends, we struggle through horrid winters, natural disasters and an untold number of everyday peevances, and yet here we are anyway.

Karen captures that with a superior sense both in lyrics and delivery and a strong, yet gentle vocal demeanor. These are songs that stay with you, hit home in places where you emotionally and experientially dwell. They've got melodic clout, too.

It's a zinger! Nowadays we need somebody to sing for us honestly about what it can be like to be alive right now. Karen does that admirably. Spanning a space between jazz per se and a straightforward delivery of her impactful songs, Karen Mantler delivers the goods, very much HER goods!

Lorraine Feather, Attachments

Some bloggers only do certain music, just chamber classical, for example, or just free jazz. Not to toot my own horn but my blogs reflect the scope of what I listen to when left to my own resources, which generally is not EVERYTHING, but there is an interlocking set of musics that all come together for me as "music". Well, duh, what else would it be?

So today I present to you a recording that the free folks may not expect, or the high boppers. Of course that matters little at the moment because I REALLY like this album. Now who could it be? Well you probably already glanced at the headline to this post so you know already. It's singer Lorraine Feather and her latest, Attachments (Jazzed Media 1063). You may recall that last April 18th I covered her with Stephanie Trick and their Nouveau Stride duo, which floored me.

So Lorraine is back in her solo guise. This isn't her first in that zone. I have not heard the others. Attachments needs no "before" however to motivate. It's a collection of songs to which she contributed the lyrics, some in collaboration with contemporary musicsmiths, others, like Bach, not. Ms. Feather sings very well, very very well, and so let's get that out of the way, though that is the point in many ways. She has dead-on pitch, great phrasing, and a charming individual sound to those pipes. OK?

But there's more here. Her lyrics are especially concerned with relationships and their complex ups and downs, loneliness and togetherness, sometimes combined in the same moment, and they are stunning. Somehow she combines the sensibilities of Annie Ross, Jon Hendricks and Joni Mitchell. Sad, funny, all kinds of poetic expressions come into play here, and they are combined with some beautiful musical song forms.

It's mostly a small combo, good players. Some of it is jazz in the up sense, sometimes its balladry, always there are twists and turns. "159," the title cut "Attachments," most all of it. These are definitive versions of really great songs. There are definite standard possibilities in many of the songs going forward, but they are so Lorraine that you feel you know her inner being after hearing it all.

I don't want to overstate it, but I am mightily impressed with this record. Great songs are very hard to come by today, as any listen to the Top 40 stations or even many Broadway shows will remind you forcibly. Attachments has real song crafting in the way it used to be and still can be. And Lorraine Feather sings them all with a musicality that cannot be ignored.

Wow.