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ID: FHR10 (EAN: 5060216340050) | 1 CD | DDD Released in: 2011
- LABEL:
- FIRST HAND RECORDS
- Collection:
- Jazz
- Composers:
- NIEPER, Wendy
-
Interprets:
- FAIRWEATHER, Digby (trumpet) | MOSES, Dave (bass) | NIEPER, Wendy | PACK, Helder (drums) | PERRIN, Roland (piano) | SILK, Guy (drums)
- Other info:
Recorded and mastered by Nick Taylor, Porcupine Studios.
With Special guest - Digby Fairweather - Trumpet
One of the leading jazz vocalists in the UK, Wendy Nieper is a very versatile, sophisticated jazz vocalist and a gifted scat singer. Her rich vocal colors are complemented by wonderful phrasing and great musicality. Her wide experience as a singer includes being a member of the Swingle Singers with whom she recorded five albums. She has appeared on numerous albums both as a classical and jazz singer and has toured extensively around the globe. On this album, Nieper is accompanied by a great band including the talented composer/ pianist Roland Perrin and the jazz legend Digby Fairweather. First Flight is an explosive mix of styles from Cuban to jazz and pop to funk. If you like Diana Krall, Stacey Kent, Claire Martin then we are sure you will love First Flight.
Booklet notes
When you break open the packaging of a new album and put it into the CD player, do you always start at the beginning? Maybe it is years of building radio programmes and reviewing CDs, but I tend to make for the standards first. Of course it is interesting to hear completely new music - and there’s plenty of it on offer here - but I confess to having started listening to this album with Good Bait and Ponciana. The reasoning goes that you’ll quickly get the measure of a singer and her accompanists according to how they tackle familiar material.
I wasn’t more than half a bar into Good Bait when my ears pricked up. Here was Tadd Dameron’s epitome of a four-four swing theme transferred into a dancing 6/8 rhythm. After a quick zip through the vocalise of the verse, a nice scat chorus is followed by some deft unison between voice and piano. Meanwhile, Ponciana escapes nicely from the shadow of Ahmad Jamal, and becomes a fresh-sounding piece, with some inventive vocal harmonies on the introductory theme and a sweetly sung chorus that steers a neat course between the gauche ingénue qualities of an Astrud Gilberto and the more knowing approach of a Julie London. Clearly Wendy Nieper is a singer who is prepared to tackle familiar material with originality, and she is paced every step of the way by pianist and, on several tracks, composer, Roland Perrin.
I knew Roland’s work from the Blue Planet Orchestra, and as a pianist who had worked with many visiting stars, especially the South Africans in exile who had congregated around the Brotherhood of Breath. I had not realised that like Wendy Nieper, he had a foot, if not an entire leg, in the classical world as well.
For pianists, there are plenty of precedents for straddling the classical and jazz worlds. Fats Waller and James P. Johnson were both accomplished classical players, as was Art Tatum. Bud Powell recorded his personal take on J. S. Bach, and more recently both Chick Corea and Keith Jarrett have moved effectively between the worlds of the Mozartian concert hall and the jazz club. It is less usual for a singer to make a reputation in both the jazz and classical worlds.
Wendy Nieper, however, is someone who has, with duo recordings of Chopin, Canteloube, Sondheim and Bernstein to her credit.
“I focussed on classical singing first,” she told me, “because it demands that you train your voice before you reach a certain age. Classical singing involves a completely different technique from jazz, because you have to develop a core sound, and aim for very clear pronunciation. I’ve always stressed that what I do involves two very different voices. The classical voice is designed to project. It’s very loud, and has a brilliance and ring to it. My jazz voice, on the other hand, is very quiet and intimate, and it plays on things that the microphone gives you. It can be breathy; you can distort your vowel sounds for effect, and be more casual about your consonants. It comes from a different place physically, so you have to change your vocal position.”
The opening track, Blower’s Daughter makes this point perfectly, with Wendy caressing the lyric in a manner a classical singer could not contemplate. Yet the purity of her sound and her use of different registers is a clue to the rigorous training she has undergone, and her mastery of vocal technique. Originally, she had intended to give the first chorus of Solomente a classical treatment, projecting her soprano voice over Perrin’s deft classically inspired rhythmic figures. But it sounded wrong, and instead she ended up with the humming chorus that introduces Pablo Neruda’s Spanish lyrics. The closest she comes to revealing her classical voice is in the link between these and the English version of what she describes as a “landscape song”.
Landscape is important to Wendy in her own song writing. In Roland Perrin, whom she met at a house party she threw a while ago, she has found a collaborator who shares her love of terrain, and of experiment. She says. “I love singing descriptive lyrics like in Empty Beach (a song about someone lost in thought on a seashore) where it runs ‘Clouds drift high in a vast rose sky, time dissolves in a sea bird’s cry’ or ‘Holding on to a silk thin thread, of images forming then quickly shed’. We experimented with the music so that in that same song we do a contrary motion scale (piano going up, voice going down) just before the words ‘Can Echo’ which I then echo in a different key!” From our conversation, I was intrigued to learn that Digby Fairweather’s Harmon muted trumpet here is representing a seagull!
Tree also explores landscape themes, although Wendy confesses this song has been with her a long time, saying, “The rhythmic theme came from a ditty that I wrote as a kid. And Roland kindly made it into something real and quite different.” Their partnership nods in the direction of the jazz tradition as well, on the quirky Monk-ish What’ll it be?, which was written about a waitress in a restaurant where Wendy once worked in Richmond, Surrey.
Overall, the album is a highly successful blend of new takes on old material, and new takes on new material. Although she and Roland had met and discussed the music before the session, Wendy stresses that it was recorded in the age-old manner of jazz records, where four musicians who had not recorded together before arrived on the day and played music that was new to all of them. Each take was an adventure, and the same applied to the second day of recording when Helder Pack replaced Guy Silk for another voyage into the unknown. And as a bonus, Wendy adds quite a few improvised sections at the end of the songs, scatting or humming as an instrumentalist, playing off her fellow musicians, and turning the entire album into a genuine musical conversation, which like all discourses, runs deep and shallow, and hot and cold, and fast and slow, as it develops.
© 2011 Alyn Shipton (Jazz critic, The Times)
| NIEPER, Wendy | | | 1. | The Blowers Daughter - Damien Rice | 4:47 | | | 2. | Retrospective - Roland Perrin | 5:13 | | | 3. | Solomente - Wendy Nieper & Roland Perrin | 4:52 | | | 4. | What'll it Be? - Wendy Nieper & Roland Perrin | 3:14 | | | 5. | Empty Beach - Wendy Nieper & Roland Perrin | 7:10 | | | 6. | Persuasion - Roland Perrin | 3:12 | | | 7. | Poinciana - Nat Simon & Buddy Bernier | 5:18 | | | 8. | Good Bait - Tadd Dameron & Count Basie | 4:03 | | | 9. | Tree - Wendy Nieper & Roland Perrin | 4:02 | | | 10. | My One and Only Love - Robert Mellin & Guy Wood | 4:10 | | Classical Source -May 2011
Wendy Nieper first came to prominence in the 1990s singing in local jazz clubs while studying classical singing at the Birmingham Conservatoire. Moving to London she joined The Swingle Singers performing at jazz festivals, in concerts and at venues around the world including La Scala, the Châtelet in Paris and Ronnie Scott’s in London. Since leaving the The Swingle Singers she has become a jazz performer touring much of Europe and the UK. Her session work includes the films of “Harry Potter”, “Lord of the Rings”, “Star Wars” and “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”. Her classical repertoire has found her singing with notable ensembles and recordings include songs by Canteloube and Chopin, as well as Bernstein and Sondheim. She also has the distinction of having been a personal coach to Sir Michael Caine.
“First Flight” is a mixture of the familiar and the relatively unknown. There are several songs by Nieper herself, writing with her co-producer and accompanist Roland Perrin, a mixture of up- and down-beat compositions. ‘What’ll it be?’ is up-tempo in a free jazz style, while ‘Retrospective waltz’ is a wordless scat number in which Nieper takes her voice every which way it can go with apparent ease. ‘Empty beach’ is more contemplative, not quite a torch song but heading that way and aided immeasurably by the plangent trumpet playing of Digby Fairweather. At the piano Perrin, no stranger to the classical field, provides strong accompaniment as well as some memorable compositions that sit midway between a strict classical style and the unfettered freedom of jazz improvisation. The more familiar tracks are Nat Simon’s ‘Poinciana’, here performed with a gentle bossa nova rhythm producing an impressive number that is instantly ‘catchable’. Then comes the Count Basie/Tadd Dameron composition ‘Good bait’ with a Brubeck-ish opening that trips along with its own urgency. The last track of the ten is ‘My one and only true love’, music by Guy Wood and lyrics by Guy Mellin, in which a rippling piano accompanies a slow, thoughtful lyric to a melody that flows elegantly along before finally fading away. Wendy Nieper’s voice rises up the register with great subtlety reaching for those soaring stratospheric notes with consummate skill. The liner notes invoke comparisons with Astrud Gilberto and Julie London but, as Wendy Nieper has also recorded Lucianio Berio’s Sinfonia (for eight voices and orchestra), she may well be setting off in a direction that could, with her pure, haunting vocal sound, produce another artist of the stature of Cathy Berberian.
Reviewed by: Michael Darvell
UK Jazz Radio - March 2011 ****
Ms Nieper is essentially a classical artist who has found jazz amenable. Instrumentally, this relationship has a distinguished history, vocally, less so.
Here, it works.
Working with Roland Perrin & assorted good musicians, her versatility results in a cd that is full of variety & always enjoyable. When she sings emotionally, as on "Blower's Daughter", with Perrin's tense accompaniment, the result is strong contemporary jazz. Her "Poinciana" is also a fresh & expressive take on a song with somewhat dated words & her own scatty "Retrospective Waltz" is a good jazz performance. She wrote "Empty Beach" with Perrin & her singing here is again emotional & is backed by some melancholy Digby Fairweather.
She & Roland Perrin work well, his playing keeping everything grounded in jazz, when Wendy might have been tempted to lapse from the jazz straight & narrow, as many a virtuoso does.
The last track is "My One & Only Love", hardly a jazz performance, but beautifully sung.
Definitely one of the best singers in an overcrowded field.
Reviewed by: Martin Bright
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