Reviews

CYRILLE AIMÉE

MOVE ON: A SONDHEIM ADVENTURE (MACK AVENUE)

Considering his iconic status as Broadway’s towering genius, Stephen Sondheim hasn’t made much of an impression on the jazz canon. I can’t remember the last time I heard a jazz singer tackle “Send in the Clowns,” his only song that can fairly be called a standard (well, aside from the West Side Story tunes that feature his lyrics). Sondheim’s work is generally viewed, with some justification, as being tough to cover. But by embracing the emotional complexity of his oeuvre, Cyrille Aimée offers an object lesson in how to make difficult material one’s own with Move On: A Sondheim Adventure.

As an autobiographical song cycle tracing the vertiginous trajectory of an ill-fated relationship, the album works on every level, drawing strength from the original contexts of the songs while serving her particular needs as a storyteller. What’s most impressive is the way Aimée draws on her varied musical experiences, starting with the lapidary loops on the unaccompanied version of “When I Get Famous.” She summons the street beats of New Orleans, her adopted hometown, on “Take Me to the World,” and mines a deep vein of ambivalence with Brazilian guitarist Diego Figueiredo, a longtime collaborator, on “Marry Me a Little” and “With So Little to Be Sure Of.”

Accompanied by a French piano trio on a jazz ballad treatment of “Loving You,” Aimée lays bare the abject self-abnegation that plants early seeds of doom in the relationship. But the rollercoaster is just getting started, hitting a romantic peak with “Un Baiser D’Adieu,” her Sondheim-approved translation of “One More Kiss.” Whether or not Move On leads other jazz singers to check out Sondheim’s songbook for material, Aimée has taken the composer out of cabarets and into the jazz clubs that have shunned his music for far too long.

ANDREW GILBERT

THE COMET IS COMING

TRUST IN THE LIFEFORCE OF THE DEEP MYSTERY (IMPULSE!)

Submerged in Sun Ra’s Afro-cosmological vision, The Comet Is Coming’s brand of psychedelic jazz on their second full-length album sounds like it’s been fused with soundtrack music by Tangerine Dream. Synthesist Danalogue (Dan Leavers) tends toward old-school analog axes. Combine them with King Shabaka’s (Shabaka Hutchings) sax and bass clarinet hypno-vamps and Betamax’s (Max Hallett) sampled drum loops, and Trust in the Lifeforce of the Deep Mystery is trance-inducing.

That may not sound like praise within the restless matrix of jazz, but it works. TCiC’s London jazz scene has deep roots in the city’s underground dance clubs, and Barbadian leader Hutchings grew up on the Caribbean’s intoxicating rhythmic patterns. The relentless repetitions throughout “Summon the Fire” are no less intense for being such—if anything, King Shabaka’s overmiked tenor gains momentum, and ferocity with it. Ditto “Timewave Zero,” with its punching-bag onslaught, and “Blood of the Past,” which is amplified by the chainsaw-like buzz of Danalogue’s Roland Jupiter 4 before Kate Tempest’s commanding poetry takes over.

“Super Zodiac” works itself into a frenzy, Betamax’s beats thudding past like rifle fire, with alluring drones from the Jupiter 4 (complete with that wobble you always thought was your cassette player’s fault). Of course, it’s not all about intensity. The opening “Because the End Is Really the Beginning” is a warm wash of synth and sax.

Hutchings has in just a few years become a major force in jazz, partly by reminding us what vitality can come could have used some more linear improvisations, if only to prove that real, live humans are back there. But that’s no reason to change a delicious recipe—even if it does sound weirdly like cues from .