Blues shouter Janiva Magness, with her Wanda Jackson-meets-Etta James gusto (done up with a big dollop of Tina Turner feistiness) has long been a personal favorite. Her latest disc, the self-produced Use What You Got (Blues Leaf), serves only to enhance my exalted opinion. Alternating between the blow-the-roof-off electricity of scorchers like Memphis Slim’s “I’m Lost Without You” and Rufus Thomas’ “All Night Worker” and the torchy allure of such sizzling mini-dramas as Charlie Rich’s “Who Will the Next Fool Be?” and Billie Holiday’s “Stormy Blues,” Magness again proves herself a vocal tsunami-naturally beautiful, uncompromisingly authoritative and overwhelmingly powerful.
Originally PublishedRelated Posts
Sonny Terry/Brownie McGhee: Backwater Blues
Start Your Free Trial to Continue Reading
Become a JazzTimes member to explore our complete archive of interviews, profiles, columns, and reviews written by music’s best journalists and critics.
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
Become a JazzTimes member to explore our complete archive of interviews, profiles, columns, and reviews written by music’s best journalists and critics.
Kurt Elling: Man in the Air
Nate Chinen makes the argument that Kurt Elling is the most influential jazz vocalist of our time
Scott LaFaro
Previously unavailable recordings and a new bio illuminate the legend of bassist Scott LaFaro