The Swedish singer Rigmor Gustafsson sounded just dandy throughout 2003’s I Will Wait for You. She sounds even better when teamed with exemplary French pianist Jacky Terrasson on Close to You (ACT Music). Billed as a celebration of Dionne Warwick, it’s really more an homage to the combined genius of Bacharach and David, since several of the selected songs were more famously recorded by artists other than Warwick, including “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head” (B.J. Thomas), “What the World Needs Now” (Jackie DeShannon) and “I Just Don’t Know What to Do With Myself” (originally done to near-suicidal perfection by Dusty Springfield). Weaving through such pop chestnuts (along with such later, lesser-known delights as Luther Vandross’ “So Amazing” and Jerry Ragovoy’s “Move Me No Mountain”), Gustafsson suggests Blondie’s Debbie Harry after a big gulp of Astrud Gilberto and a Julie London chaser. She is as cool and bracing as a northern breeze on a sunny Stockholm afternoon.
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