Home » Jazz Articles » Album Review » Lauren Newton: Filigree

154

Lauren Newton: Filigree

By

View read count
Lauren Newton: Filigree
Listening to Lauren Newton sing is like listening to Cathy Berberian, Ella Fitzgerald, and Yoko Ono, if someone cut up tapes of these three and mixed them together in small bits without transition. She is an abstract expressionist singer, working in the realm of pure sound with a voice that is pure in its beauty and startling in the things she'll choose to do with it. Her ability to blend her voice with instrumental sounds is uncanny, and led her to a long tenure as a vocalist with the Vienna Art Orchestra.

This disc was recorded in 1982. Newton is still very much active - not long ago Anthony Braxton released his Composition 192 on Leo, a CD-long duet with Newton - but Timbre demonstrates that the primary elements of her art were in place sixteen years ago or more. She fronts a quartet here, including David Friedman on vibes, Thomas Stabenow on bass, and Manfred Kniel on drums.

Newton has some rewarding exchanges with Kniel and the restrained, classically-inflected Stabenow, but her chief foil is Friedman, who can play the vibes like Bobby Hutcherson or build shimmering atmospheric runways for Newton's takeoffs. When Friedman solos - as he does impressively on the funky middle section of "Early Piece" and soulfully on "Filigree" - the music sounds jazzy. When Newton enters, it usually goes in different directions, although toward the beginning of "Timbre" and here and there ("Who's Blue," which really does have a bluesy feel) she even sounds a little bit like Ella.

Newton is a beguiling singer of melodies. "Timbre," "Filigree" and "Early Piece" are full of simply beautiful moments. In "Conversations" and "Run of the Mill" she explores the tonalities of spoken speech, wordlessly capturing the inflections of dialogues running from the slyly insinuating to the heated. At the beginning of "Run of the Mill" she creaks and croaks like a Central Asian. On "Cross Rhythms" she sounds like an instructor on a French exercise tape, scatting over Kniel's big beat.

All in all, an unpredictable set of impeccably delivered vocalise, impressive in its range of moods and textures.

Personnel

Album information

Title: Filigree | Year Released: 1998 | Record Label: Leo Records

Tags

Comments


PREVIOUS / NEXT




Support All About Jazz

Get the Jazz Near You newsletter All About Jazz has been a pillar of jazz since 1995, championing it as an art form and, more importantly, supporting the musicians who make it. Our enduring commitment has made "AAJ" one of the most culturally important websites of its kind, read by hundreds of thousands of fans, musicians and industry figures every month.

Go Ad Free!

To maintain our platform while developing new means to foster jazz discovery and connectivity, we need your help. You can become a sustaining member for as little as $20 and in return, we'll immediately hide those pesky ads plus provide access to future articles for a full year. This winning combination vastly improves your AAJ experience and allow us to vigorously build on the pioneering work we first started in 1995. So enjoy an ad-free AAJ experience and help us remain a positive beacon for jazz by making a donation today.

More

The Sound of Raspberry
Tatsuya Yoshida / Martín Escalante
All In Motion
Dave Redmond
Cat & The Hounds
Colin Hancock's Jazz Hounds Featuring Catherine...

Popular

Old Home/New Home
The Brian Martin Big Band
My Ideal
Sam Dillon
Ecliptic
Shifa شفاء - Rachel Musson, Pat Thomas, Mark Sanders
Lado B Brazilian Project 2
Catina DeLuna & Otmaro Ruíz

Get more of a good thing!

Our weekly newsletter highlights our top stories, our special offers, and upcoming jazz events near you.

Install All About Jazz

iOS Instructions:

To install this app, follow these steps:

All About Jazz would like to send you notifications

Notifications include timely alerts to content of interest, such as articles, reviews, new features, and more. These can be configured in Settings.