Secrets is as much a showcase for Wallace Roney and company as it is for thirty-something vocalist Tricia Tahara, a fine classically trained singer and Berklee grad. Drawing material from a variety of sources, including tunes by Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter, the singer delivers eight tracks with illustrious assistance from trumpeter Roney, reedman Antoine Roney, keyboardist Geri Allen, bassist Ralphe Armstrong, and drummer Lenny White. Tahara’s previous ventures into pop and dance music are evident in her emerging jazz style, and, while she hasn’t quite yet captured improvisatory sensibilities with comfortable ease and artful phrasing, she’s on her way. Wallace Roney’s imprint is all over this session (he co-produced with White) and Tahara’s presentation sustains the same soaring, haunting qualities for which the trumpeter is known. Tahara’s gorgeously powerful soprano voice is equally suitable for opera as she proves on “L’Altra Notte in Fondo al Mare” from the Arrigo Boito opera, Mefistofele, which also features the best improvs from Wallace Roney, et al. This is not your usual singer-plus-accompaniment album, but an intoxicating adventure which focuses on a new voice who shows considerable promise.
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.
Harry Connick, Jr.: Direct Hits
Two decades after his commercial breakthrough, Harry Connick Jr. taps legendary producer Clive Davis for an album of crooner roots and beloved tunes
Scott LaFaro
Previously unavailable recordings and a new bio illuminate the legend of bassist Scott LaFaro