![]() ![]() It makes you comb through its reaches for the treasure awaiting the diligent. Accordingly, Clear Day is not an album to throw on in the background to score empty dinner conversation, lest you miss something special. Emilie-Claire Barlow knows this, and as a result her work is one of constant surprise. A great performer never shows you her top, because then the audience will realize she has nowhere else to go. Her vocal runs are remarkable not only for their range but their restraint. Her voice can be by turns searing, sweet, aching, dreamy or white-hot sexy, while never succumbing to the nasty American Idol habit of cranking things past 11 on every single track to transfix wandering attentions. She takes a spotlit center stage with her often dizzying, always compelling aural acrobatics. Tossing the script like that might be a concern if entrusted to a vocalist of lesser chops, but Barlow, backed this time by both her regular supporting combo players and the 52-member Netherlands-based Metropole Orkest, is more than up to the challenge. So is “Fix You,” retaining the comforting core of the lyrics but shedding the histrionic treacle that unbalanced Coldplay’s original. What follows are songs you know but yet don’t: the early eighties groove of “Under Pressure” is here, but without the bass riff later made infamous by Vanilla Ice. The title track opens with a movie-esque swell of strings and brass, like an eager, applauding audience waiting for the curtain to rise and the star to assume her place. Far from settling for a release of glorified karaoke cuts, however, Barlow deconstructs each song down to its basic elements and rebuilds it into a brand new confection, offering a teasing taste of the familiar to settle you into your seat before the inventive arrangements blast you out of it. Clear Day offers a broad canvas on which she can play – a map of the world, if you will – from classic Tin Pan Alley numbers to Joni Mitchell, Van Morrison, the Beatles and Queen and even a French interpretation of a traditional song from Mexican folklore for good measure. On the opening instrumental track “Amundsen,” she whispers enticingly in French, “all things are possible” – and sets about taking us on a journey that proves it.īarlow has always been an artist with the ability to reach into songs across different genres and with affectionate fingers, draw out the jazz you never knew was hiding inside. Emilie-Claire Barlow, an award-winning Canadian singer with ten albums under her belt, knew her newest release Clear Day needed to embrace the quest beckoning at the core of jazz. So too is jazz a journey for the performers who recognize this drive at the soul of it to go, to seek the best of it out in remote corners. They’ll name-check greats like Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Ella Fitzgerald, but they’ll tell you with a gleam in their eye that the greatest jazz they ever heard was played by an unknown 75-year-old trumpeter they stumbled upon in a dive bar in Kansas City in 1978. The most learned fans of jazz will always emphasize this idea of the journey. Jazz extends you an invitation to wander through its complex depths, brain fully engaged, to discover the notes that will move your heart. More than any other form of music, jazz demands a degree of commitment, an implicit contract between song and listener. It’s a gauntlet thrown down for the bold. Jazz has never been the taste of the timid.
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