Release Date: 01 March 2019
Label: Bbe Music / Barely Breaking Even
Packaging Type: Digipak
No of Units: 1
Barcode: 730003128226
Genres: Jazz
Description
The first of two superb records by The Janet Lawson Quintet, their eponymous debut set originally came out in 1981 on Inner City. An astonishing tour-de-force of the jazz singer's art released at a time when jazz was widely viewed as being artistically moribund and when the market for straight-ahead jazz had shrunk to something of a rump (although the adventurous Inner City label had achieved a certain cache with hard-core jazz aficionados around the world, and notably with the UK's jazz-funk scene of the late '70s). While many of her contemporaries turned to a more commercially viable and often musically unadventurous fusion, Janet Lawson's record made the case for jazz as a still-exciting, living art-form. On the face of it, Janet Lawson can be seen as a direct descendant of those jazz giants, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan and Anita O'Day, equally at home with the precise articulation and interpretation of lyrics, attentive to diction and the nuances of words, and with the 'pure' music of wordless improvisation, known as 'scat' singing. Whereas someone like the once-great Ella had latterly turned scat into something of a novelty, routinely hammed up for cosy audiences that didn't want jazz to sound too 'difficult', Janet Lawson, like her contemporaries in Europe Ursula Dudziak and Norma Winstone, was working at something altogether 'deeper'.What that something was is best understood by reference to her book, The Integrated Artist: Improvisation as A Way of Life. Much as John Coltrane had done before her, Janet Lawson worked out an approach to music as an extension of her life, and as a way of harmonizing it with the universe. In this book Janet dissects the work a singer (and by extension any musician) needs to do to best draw from the well of creativity within us all... processes of 'FEELING, LISTENING, HEARING and CONNECTING' that all come before any actual 'singing'. The goal is a kind of spiritual awakening, self-knowledge and the ability to communicate those qualities to others.
Tracklisting
various artists
various artists
various artists
Omar
Will & James Ragar
Ginger Johnson and His African Messengers
Will & James Ragar
Jessica Lauren
Emily Saunders
Anthony Ferrara
Alex Norris
Friedrich Gulda
Freddy Cole
Duke Ellington And His Famous Orchestra
Petros Klampanis
Makiko Hirabayashi
