Five years ago, golden-voiced Dutch beauty Fleurine doubled with pianist Brad Mehldau, serving as coperformer, coarranger and, on two tracks, cowriter, for the mesmerizing Close Enough for Love, teaching us, among other things, that Supertramp’s “The Logical Song” could be transformed into five-and-a-half minutes of poetic longing and that Jimi Hendrix, Antonio Carlos Jobim and Michel Legrand made for contented neighbors. Now, with Fire (Coast to Coast), her equally sublime American debut produced by Robert Sadin (whose long list of critical and popular accomplishments includes Wayne Shorter’s Alegria), she continues to practice her cunning brand of vocal wizardry, both with Mehldau (he joins her for three tracks) and without (working variously with such other ace accompanists as tenor saxophonist Seamus Blake, accordionist Gil Goldstein and her decade-long sidemen, guitarist Jesse van Ruller and bassist Johan Plomp) on two originals and 10 covers. Apart from the cuddly, self-composed “Hey Little Girl,” the vibrant “Voce,” which she crafted in tandem with Jose Luis Lopretti, and the likeminded, if distinctly mellower, Jobim classic “So Tinha de Ser com Voce,” the emphasis is, in the spirit of that half-decade old Supertramp cover, on contemporary pop hits cleverly reimagined. The Springsteen-penned title track is reworked as a sultry samba, Frampton’s “Show Me the Way” is rewrapped in gossamer as is the Pretenders’ “Brass in Pocket,” Nick Drake’s “Fruit Tree” is kissed with a gentle autumn chill and Paul Simon’s “Still Crazy After All These Years” is, apropos its title, injected with a hint of haunted lunacy.
Originally PublishedRelated Posts
Sonny Terry/Brownie McGhee: Backwater Blues
Start Your Free Trial to Continue Reading

Jonathan Butler: The Simple Life
Jonathan Butler’s optimistic music belies a dirt-poor childhood growing up in a South Africa segregated by apartheid. Live in South Africa, a new CD and DVD package, presents a sense of the resulting inner turmoil, mixed with dogged resolve, that paved the way to his status as an icon in his country and successful musician outside of it. Looking back, the 46-year-old Butler says today, the driving forces that led to his overcoming apartheid-the formal policy of racial separation and economic discrimination finally dismantled in 1993-were family, faith and abundant talent.
“When we were kids, our parents never talked about the ANC [African National Congress] or Nelson Mandela,” he says. Butler was raised as the youngest child in a large family. They lived in a house patched together by corrugated tin and cardboard, in the “coloreds only” township of Athlone near Cape Town. “They never talked about struggles so we never knew what was happening.”
Start Your Free Trial to Continue Reading

Scott LaFaro
Previously unavailable recordings and a new bio illuminate the legend of bassist Scott LaFaro
Kurt Elling: Man in the Air
Nate Chinen makes the argument that Kurt Elling is the most influential jazz vocalist of our time