Home » Jazz Articles » Album Review » Rebecca Martin: The Growing Season

491

Rebecca Martin: The Growing Season

By

View read count
Rebecca Martin: The Growing Season
Rebecca Martin's name keeps showing up in the jazz press, but she's more appropriately classified as one of the best singer/songwriters today. She's issued sessions heavy on standards, specifically 2002's Middlehope (Fresh Sound New Talent, 2004), and sung them lately with drummer Paul Motian, garnering her deserved high praise. But as stunning and personal as her work in the standards realm has been, her real strength is crafting and presenting her own songs, intimately spellbinding listeners into her world.

She does all this with the big, bad jazz boys. Here, with a drummer no less able to spin a yarn without lyrics, Brian Blade, and a bassist whose instrument sings as mellifluously as she (and who also mans the husband chair)—Larry Grenadier. Kurt Rosenwinkel on guitar and keyboards, in a stellar sideman performance, reveals deep pop sensibilities and skills in his dual commitment as producer and chief sound sculptor.

Martin's vehicles for intimacy are anything but standard-fare, crafting songs that forsake narrative for a priority on imparting sentiment, and fashioning melodies that give precedence to forming naturally cascading cadences over the guidelines of traditional harmony.

"The Space In a Song to Think" crystallizes, with an uplifting, spiritual lilt, all that she's about, rapturously conveying things the way she feels them. She merely posits that in plying her craft, "What if all I meant to do, was to clear an open space in between the page and ink, where there was only you?" As she repeats the words "only you," four times, magically haloed by Rosenwinkel's Rhodes, it becomes an incantation, a rhapsodic spell wherein, exactly one minute into the record, you have indeed become hers, to follow her wherever she may wish. Most importantly, the stimulus to follow comes from within, not primarily because of what she's saying, but because she's exposed a feeling, an incentive already deep inside. Musically substantive, Martin's arpeggios outline the melodic contour while providing the springboard from which Rosenwinkel can progressively stack harmonies, culminating as his outro incorporates hand-over-hand dissonant clusters.

"A Million Miles" ascends in moveable chord forms, stated simply by Martin and fleshed out by Rosenwinkel. The songstress totally gives herself unto her love, and within the music, to us all, prodded by arching guitar—as only Rosenwinkel can arc— at times echoed subtly by her doubled voice. Martin stretches syllabic snippets over one course of the progression to state "I don't know why it took this long to find your face in the crowd." But when she tags it with "I found you now," as a restrained scalar statement by Rosenwinkel simultaneously enters, we are transported, swept up with her again, as the simple sentiment is revealed to be mystical—each of us examining the overwhelming odds of ever finding our soul mates.

Martin is much more than a songwriter clinging passionately to a dogma of honesty in lyric and harmony, and achieving it. Emotion radiates from her recordings at an unusual level—one that demands reciprocation.

Track Listing

The Space In A Song To Think; A Million Miles; Just A Boy; To Prove Them Wrong; What Feels Like Home; Lullaby; As For You, Raba; After Midnight; Make The Days Run Fast; Free At Last; Pieces; Talking; You're Older.

Personnel

Rebecca Martin: vocals, acoustic guitar; Kurt Rosenwinkel: electric guitar, piano, nylon string guitar, keyboards, Fender Rhodes, tack piano, vibraphone; Larry Grenadier: acoustic and electric bass; Brian Blade: drums and percussion.

Album information

Title: The Growing Season | Year Released: 2008 | Record Label: Sunnyside 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

Eternal Moments
Yoko Yates
From "The Hellhole"
Marshall Crenshaw
Tramonto
John Taylor

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.