I will be writing a column on Length & Time in music, in each presenting an album and its strategies that pertain to addressing Length & Time.
Not too long ago, populaces loved and lived mainly along to the sounds of acoustic instruments. These days, electronic songs thrill larger crowds. It’s the case for Jazz, where electronic Jazz, especially electronic Jazz-fusion, became the new popular Jazz with Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew. Some musicians, nonetheless, despite the dominance of electronic music, continued and continue to practice acoustic Jazz. Ashleigh Smith’s Sunkissed is some of the most pleasant acoustic Jazz recently released, especially because of Smith’s vocals.
Smith is this album’s main attraction. Though her band plays hard and is full of instruments, her alto singing resonates more than the rest of her band. In “Love is You,” and in “Sara Smile” her voice steals the show. For “Sara Smile,” the drumming is loud but the song is about her singing. Smith’s singing ‘my / darling’ resonates more than heavy drumming, impressively.
“Blackbird” is a song that features a blackbird: that bird-muse of classical poets like Wallace Stevens (Among twenty snowy mountains / The only moving thing/ Was the eye of the blackbird.) When she sings “black / bird / fly,” it is a metaphor of someone presented in elsewhere in the song “you / were / only waiting.”; it is well sung poetry. The song features incredible piano and cool (calm and collected, not cool jazz) drumming.
About her own art, black woman painter of Color Fields Alma Thomas has stated that she strove to, simply, “paint something beautiful.” “Something beautiful,” as opposed to entertaining, moving, or political, is a traditional aesthetic in the Jazz singing and art in general of black women. It is “permission to be who I am” as Smith sings on “Love Is You.” Smith is the very best of the young black women who are in line to sing primarily beautiful Jazz, like Cassandra Wilson, have before her. As with Alma Thomas, there is hedonism to this beauty, though the sober kind.
The sultry acoustic Jazz song made for radio play that Ashleigh Smith and her band practices comes off as being that of a tradition. Along with it sounding traditional, Sunkissed seems to ask of its listener to dance like one did in the past, as opposed to as one does in this boisterous present. If anything, it’s neo-acoustic jazz, the sort that enlivens with traditionalism.
Buy Sunkissed in the Americas
Buy Sunkissed in Europe
Author: Adolf Alzuphar
