New York
Ron Kaplan
Kapland Records
Quiet Beauty
James Todd
Scottish Fox Music
Two CD’s that have nothing to do with each other, but there’s a common thread…
I’ve been trying to figure out why the vocals on jazz CDs sound different than say pop and top 40 and rock and all that, and it dawned on me that it’s most likely because they’re put out “au natural.” They’re not enhanced, and if they are it’s to make ’em sound natural and easy rather than full of reverb and electricity.
It’s a different feel, and if you’re used to the hyped up vocals of today’s pop, it’s almost too bare for the ear. So it takes some getting used to.
Ron Kaplan has a fun idea with his CD “New York,” in that it’s all jazz tunes about The Big Apple. Harlem, Broadway, Manhattan, all standards that give a nod to the city. I never much thought of NYC as a jazz town, usually for those of us in the Midwest we go for St. Louis, Memphis, New Orleans, that kind of thing. But I’m sure in NYC there’s a bit of everything going on.
Kaplan has an easygoing voice, he gets around a song cleanly, and there’s no problem understanding the lyrics, even if you’re not paying attention. The musicianship behind him is excellent. Sometimes in fact, their skill is distracting from the vocals. Well not exactly that, but it calls attention to itself. The bass lines are creative and fun to listen to, the piano is light on its feet and some weird jazz chords deftly fall right into place. Trumpet, sax and clarinet add a bigger sound, and drums fill out the band nicely. There’s a lot to learn about jazz performance by listening to the band.
On the other hand, by the end of this album I was getting ready to hear something else. It all had the same sort of feel… maybe I don’t know this genre enough to get the subtle differences, but exploring oddities of instrumentation would be cool, a couple songs in a radically different style might not be what he had in mind but it would shake things up a bit, varying the vocal delivery to show off his singing prowess more would be cool, too.
That same thing crops up in James Todd’s Quiet Beauty: Heartsongs for Cello and Piano. It’s a collection of songs without words, cello solo mostly (or duo, a lot of it is either double stopped or double tracked), with a piano accompaniment by William Morse. It’s very legato, cantabile… as he says, quiet beauty. And it’s nice to hear someone play a cello, just play a cello, and not try to turn it into something it’s not. It’s not really new age, it’s more contemporary classical. Just some sweet melodies.
But it’s all a lot of the same stuff, and it often didn’t “take off” as high as I was waiting for it to fly. If you’re going to have a CD that showcases one instrument, you need to, in my opinion, show that instrument off, and if you’re going to have one composer, you need to also show that off as well.
For instance, take the melody down to the lower end of the cello, the upper end of the piano, change up the articulation... try a song or two with a different feel, sometimes I was looking for a little more depth of feeling in the composition, sometimes you need to consciously “go there” and try something different or more adventurous... you can do that and still keep your “mission.”
So all in all, the albums are solid, but, IMHO (in my humble opinion), need more variety.
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