 This is Rebekka and she does jazz.
Tonight is music night beneath a nutty dreamer's moon. As everybody knows, the night of all musics. So what did I get, unless I shut the big windows? Bagpipes! The ultimate caterwauling horror if played as they were here, very badly. That was no misty photo shoot in the glens, safe from most human ears, it's Montparnasse on a busy, noisy, happy midsummer evening.
There were two of the wretched men and the audience was already so drunk they were getting applause enough for me to fear they'd stay all evening. I kept the eggs in the fridge.
Rebekka can do the standards very nicely when she wants, putting her mastery of techniques at the service of the song rather than taking the tune just to showcase a beautiful voice, without heart.
The wailing outside reminded me this remains the Breton part of town, south of the vast glass and steel railway station originally built to service that part of France, where they might have kept the cornemuse (corne as in horn-ed, diabolical), especially when it gives us what they think is the Skye Boat Song.
A pair of local virtual neighbours at 'Montparsud' are proud of being in 'Libération' in a multipage spread BJ thought might fire me up. Another French "citizens' blog", 'MonPuteaux.com,' is in court for a "landmark libel case" in challenging the clan that runs a suburb of the capital. I'm not getting heated since this fellow, Christophe Grébert, can clearly look after himself. If the suit doesn't backfire on the Puteaux town council, I'll be surprised.
Look up Rebekka Bakken on the Net and you may turn a page or two to find a read in English.
She's Norwegian, says Jean-Luc Scolé, who has an ace choice of mainly VoWs among his "suggestions musicales" (a Quad fan), and came to my ears when somebody told me what I'd missed in April just a stone's throw from the Factory.
Rebekka at the time got a show in 'LA PLUPart DU TEMPS,' a blog worth visiting for what's on in Paris (though not tonight unless you want to stare at one of Michael Jackson's incarnations), and sometimes sings up front with the Julia Hülsmann Trio.
That means, probably, lines to come about 'Scattering Poems', not yet given a word at Amazon UK, a recent addition to the library along with today's introduction to 'The Art of How to Fall' (Amazon France; Bakken by herself hasn't crossed the Channel yet), a skill she made public in November in 2003.
I liked it so much that the month's second -- and last -- permissible online spree under way tonight, includes her latest, 'Is That You?' (out last February) and half a dozen other albums in the iTMS wishlist. Amazon's suggested companion to that is Viktoria Tolstoy's 'My Swedish Heart,' which would go into the library ... if it wasn't there already.
You have yet to read much about these Scandinavian and German (Julia H.) "jazz" wonders, who are all more than a part of the current upsurge of interest in the European jazz scene, particularly the Nordic countries -- and will outlast it by many years.
"You should have put a warning in the 'trash line'," the desk chief said about a brief "offbeat" tale today from Kenya. He was right, I much regretted subbing an item about sex with sheep, especially before lunch. Lamely, I said, "Well, there is an editor between me and the reader who gets to choose which bits to use."
"If he doesn't stop after the fourth paragraph," said David. One of the women took a look and said, "Whoever wrote that obviously enjoyed himself. And, of course, it will 'score' everywhere." Yes, it will, it was vile. As for enjoyment, I almost closed my eyes before hitting the button but presume the lady was right since few Factory stories go out even with a Latin phrase in them ("flagrant delight" or whatever it means)...
Tonight, the cover art on how to fall isn't here, since you just may have had enough erotic content and even this singer, who fell gracefully, comes naked and recumbent. The picture's instead a detail of one of the huge offerings on Rebekka Bakken's site, along with a small Tolstoy for you, since I'll write about her another time. Rebekka's original is 26.06 x 32.41 centimetres!
That generosity is reflected on the album, a turning point when she for the first time wrote all her own lyrics, which is why it was first into the library, and I'm glad I said "she does jazz" because she's also done rock, soul and R&B:
"In my early twenties I had a 'walkman experience': A friend taped 90 minutes of Bob Dylan's music. I listened to that non-stop for one week. It wasn't his singing, but his honesty that made me realize: Now I know what to do. And this knowing kind of guided me."
Dylan's the only influence she claims, but in an introspective song where she asks
"Can I turn around,
Break the bonds,
'Say goodbye to what is gone'?"
the second track and first beautiful slow, lightly scored number on the album, her voice really comes into its own, with the controlled power of a stage show star. I hesitate to make comparisons, but in getting used to everybody Rebekka can sound like when she wishes, for a friend who asked me if I've got any Billie Holliday, the answer's "Yes, but how about trying Rebecca Bakken?"
"I have great respect for jazz - that's why I don't want to say, I'm a jazz singer. On the other hand: What does it mean to say: 'I'm not a jazz singer!' I don't want to say that either. I just don't want to make a definition of what I am. I am nothing; I am just what goes through me. Maybe I'm even not a singer; I'm just doing whatever I have to do at the time. Who am I? - This question is more meaningful than the answer."
There's more than jazz here, Rebekka grew up in Oslo and I can hear a classical training and occasional echoes of the church. She moved to New York in 1995 -- there's no escaping New York when it comes to women on and around the log at the moment! -- where Andreas Felber (who wrote her sketchy bio) tells us "she explored the new terrain with her own formation until the album 'Daily Mirror' with [Austrian guitarist] Wolfgang Muthspiel opened the door to a broad audience."
Well, what "trashline" might I have used to warn unwary editors, as if the wretches haven't seen it all? "Warning, not exactly family reading"? "Adult content?" What the iTMS says, "Explicit"? I'll guess they'll come up with something. I just found it a grotty but unfortunately "newsworthy" aspect of life, which contains, like Rebekka's music, plenty of adult content. Thing is the boss was right: some editors don't read what they publish, that's "blasé" for you.
Bakken gives her news pleasingly straight, which simply means she can sing about anything without making it filthy or vulgar. If it's yet more reclining women covers you want, wait for me to review Jem, who comes from Cardiff and is among tonight's virtual wishes becoming sonic data. I only allow self-indulgence, which means I couldn't let Lizz Wright have a new album at large -- and even posters, Lizz is coming to town -- for more than a fortnight without saying I'm 'Dreaming Wide Awake' and listening.
Rebekka says:
"I have chosen 11 songs from the material I wrote during the last two years out of my own true musicality, out of where I stand. I am only trying to express myself, to express how I feel. The last two years have been amazing. So much has happened personally. That's what you hear in the music. For so long I tried to make a concept. But then I thought: Fuck the concepts. There are none. How can I decide how things are gonna be in future? The process is what is important to me."
I'd love to know who she's doing it with. Most sites and reviews in German -- my grasp is shaky to say the least -- tell me how sensual, even downright sexy, she is live, but are short on names. You don't need to read critics or look at pictures to know she's sexy, that's obvious from the music, when both Rebekka and her voice can slide from childhood and growing up and "a Hershey kiss" to 21st-century womanhood.
Now she's "fucked the concepts", what's wonderful in that "process" is the way she and, I've so far gleaned, Norwegian guitarist Eivind Aarset and trumpeter Takuya Nakamura, who adds muted loveliness to 'Powerless', take words that might simply be diary entries and turn them into beautiful, sometimes memorable, melodies. There's little technological tweaking but occasional electronic elements, mainly for sheer sound texture, don't go amiss.
 Some of today's Factory stories were both arresting and horrible, routine news on midsummer day, and like the pipers fortunately, have long since gone away -- the window can't stay closed when the temperature's slid down by several notches to a mere 25°C, the bottom side of where I begin to like it, even for Rebekka. But "routine news" can make you want to pray and music answers many of my prayers.
The real shortcoming of the iTMS is the lack of credit to the splendid drummer and bass player on this album, if you haven't got the CD. 'The Art of How to Fall' closes in the autumnal season with a prayer, another of the slows, this one sung in an outdoor temple to a god without a name:
"Daylight Is Short In Fall
Daylight is short in fall leaves turn to gold autumn and winter will enter in time to color a tired soul
Give me faith this year to find and to know; living is only what runs through an open heart living is letting go
So many words already spoken trying to explain after sunny days come rain nothing ever stays the same
The grace in change -- a gentle face that looks upon a mending heart as time passes by
Daylight is short in fall leaves turn to gold autumn and winter will enter in time to color a tired soul
Give me faith this year to find and to know that living is only what runs through an open heart living is letting go"
Some jazz reviewers, if I can understand them, acknowledge the richness and range in Bakken's stream-clear voice but wonder if she's really a jazz singer.
She makes no such claim. She's more sensible, as you've read. But if taking near diary entries and singing them to a music sometimes rooted deep in blues where your fellow "voices" are given free range to improvise around you to their heart's content and that of the audience, obviously a little differently each time, isn't jazz, then somebody may put me to rights and tell me what is.
More on the jazz in women's heads another night, since this time the music's coming to me. The joy of living here is how it does. It's jazz outside. They all look like men. But you can't have everything...
... but has anyone written a concerto for bagpipes and a fiddle and accordeon orchestra collected from Métro trains?
Please keep it on the hidden track.
12:22:44 AM link 
|
|
postbox