Regina Carter - Ella: Accentuate The Positive (2017)

2018-04-08T13:30:09Z

Regina Carter - Ella: Accentuate The Positive (2017)


1 	Ac-cent-tchu-ate The Positive 	6:53
2 	Crying In The Chapel 	6:12
3 	I'll Never Be Free 	5:15
4 	All My Life 	5:27
5 	Dedicated To You 	6:58
6 	Reach For Tomorrow 	6:57
7 	Undecided 	6:52
8 	Judy 	3:38
9 	I'll Chase The Blues Away 	5:47

Acoustic Bass, Electric Bass – Chris Lightcap
Acoustic Guitar, Electric Guitar, Slide Guitar – Marvin Sewell
Drums, Congas, Tambourine – Alvester Garnett
Piano, Electric Organ – Xavier Davis
Producer, Violin – Regina Carter
Vocals – Carla Cook, Miche Braden

One of the key ingredients to making a successful tribute album is to try evoking your love of the artist's original work, while keeping the focus on your own distinct personality, taste, and skill. In that sense, violinist Regina Carter succeeds in both honoring legendary vocalist Ella Fitzgerald and showcasing her virtuoso jazz talents on 2017's sophisticated Ella: Accentuate the Positive. Her second album for Sony Masterworks and first attached to the Sony imprint OKeh Records, Ella: Accentuate the Positive find the Detroit-born Carter exploring songs strongly associated with Fitzgerald. For longtime Carter fans who have enjoyed her deeply personal, stylistically cross-pollinated albums like 2010's Reverse Thread and 2014's Southern Comfort, this album will feel pleasingly familiar. Smartly, aside from the ebulliently rendered title track and several other time-tested favorites ("Dedicated to You," "Undecided"), Carter has chosen a handful of songs Fitzgerald recorded, but which aren't the most obvious picks from her catalog. Additionally, while Fitzgerald's preferred style of playing straight-ahead swing is certainly in Carter's wheelhouse, it is not the main stylistic focus here. Instead, we get a the title track featuring vocalist Miche Braden reworked from vintage swing into an airy and brisk progressive fusion-influenced number that's more Chick Corea than Billy May. Similarly, Carter transforms "All My Life" (originally recorded by Fitzgerald and Teddy Wilson in 1936) into a flowing, languid, '70s R&B-inflected ballad held down by Xavier Davis' deft Fender Rhodes accompaniment. Elsewhere, Carter achieves equally compelling results turning Fitzgerald's already gorgeous and yearning 1960 ballad "Reach for Tomorrow" into her own dreamy midtempo soul anthem and utterly transforming '30s swing standard "Undecided" into an expansive, funky blues-fusion groover featuring vocalist Carla Cook. That said, there are still plenty of hardcore acoustic jazz moments here, including an urbane and poignant reading of "Dedicated to You," featuring a jaw-droppingly beautiful solo turn by bassist Chris Lightcap, not to mention one of Carter's most vocal-like and heart-wrenching performances. She also keeps things nicely pared down for Hoagy Carmichael's "Judy," played here as a lively yet intimate acoustic duet with guitarist Marvin Sewell. As the title implies, Ella: Accentuate the Positive is a tribute album imbued with Carter's obvious love for Fitzgerald, but which accents everything that makes the violinist such a compelling, distinctive performer in her own right. ---Matt Collar, AllMusic Review

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Regina Carter - I'll Be Seeing You A Sentimental Journey (2006)

2011-11-21T19:36:07Z

Regina Carter - I'll Be Seeing You A Sentimental Journey (2006)


1. Anitra's Dance
2. Little Brown Jug
3. Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen				download
4. Sentimental Journey
5. You Took Advantage Of Me
6. St. Louis Blues
7. A-Tisket, A-Tasket
8. Blue Rose							download
9. This Can't Be Love
10. How Ruth Felt
11. There's A Small Hotel
12. I'll Be Seeing You

Musicians:
Regina Carter Vocal, Arranger, Violin
Xavier Davis (1-3, 5-12) Piano
Matthew Parrish Bass
Alvester Garnett (1-3, 5-8, 10-12) Drums
Dee Dee Bridgewater (3, 9) Vocal
Carla Cook (5-6, 11) Vocal
Paquito D'Rivera (1-4, 6) Clarinet
Gil Goldstein (1-3, 6, 12) Accordion

With I’ll Be Seeing You: A Sentimental Journey, violinist Regina Carter, pays tribute to the memory of her late mother, Grace Carter, in a swinging journey through the some of the classic songs of the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s that her mother loved during her youth. With effervescent arrangements featuring dare-devilishly spontaneous improvisations and interplay between Carter and her bandmates, I’ll Be Seeing You is a feel-good foray into the joys of small-group swing and classic mid-century songs.

For this album, her fifth for Verve, Carter is joined by Xavier Davis on piano, Matthew Parrish on bass, and Alvester Garnett on drums, and her special guests are vocalists Dee Dee Bridgewater and Carla Cook, Paquito D’Rivera on clarinet, and Gil Goldstein on accordion.

I’ll Be Seeing You instantly captivates from the album’s opener, “Anitra’s Dance”, by classical composer Edvard Grieg, in which Carter and her violin swing mightily, in the footsteps of The John Kirby Orchestra’s 1939 small-group jazz arrangement. The brilliant unison interplay of Carter’s violin, Gil Goldstein’s accordion, and Paquito D’Rivera’s clarinet vividly establishes the album’s period feeling. This line-up continues in a high-octane “Little Brown Jug”, a swinging hoe-down featuring more dazzling passages and playful solos from the three. Throughout the album, Carter’s stand-out rhythm section is unfailingly inventive, nuanced and hard-swinging.

The irrepressible Dee Dee Bridgewater, arguably the greatest exponent of scat singing today, is featured on a rollicking vocal on the Yiddish tune that became an Andrews Sisters hit, “Bei Mir Bist Du Shoen,” with a break-neck arrangement by the album’s producer John Clayton showcasing virtuoso playing from Carter, Goldtstein, and D’Rivera. Bridgewater also performs the Rodgers and Hart gem “This Can’t Be Love”, and scats in exuberant call-and-response to the band.

Carter’s fellow-Detroiter, Carla Cook, one of the today’s most accomplished jazz vocalists, turns in stand-out performances on “You Took Advantage of Me”, the W. C. Handy classic “St. Louis Blues”, and an elegant “There’s a Small Hotel.”

Carter has been hailed by The Wall Street Journal as “one of jazz’s most impressive musicians [with] dazzling solos [and] an impressive and diverse resume”. The Los Angeles Times called her soloing “extraordinary, bursting with joyous swing” and DownBeat asserted “you can hear the inspired passion in her virtuosity”. This has never been more true than on I’ll Be Seeing You as Carter scales new heights of spontaneity and creative soloing. The CD includes the Ella Fitzgerald standard “A-Tisket, A-Tasket” and an upbeat and swinging “Blue Rose” (Duke Ellington’s composition with wordless vocals for Rosemary Clooney), as well as a haunting arrangement of “Sentimental Journey” for violin, bass, and clarinet. The album closes with a passionately tender version of “I’ll Be Seeing You” in a dream-like arrangement by Gil Goldstein.

On her previous recording, Paganini: After a Dream, Carter made history as the first jazz violinist ever to play and record on Paganini’s historic Guarneri violin, receiving accolades for her effortless melding of classical and jazz idioms. In remembering her mother, Regina Carter recalls, with unfettered swing and virtuoso abandon, the primal joys of a classic era in American music. The familiar songs, sparkling arrangements, the all-out spontaneity and virtuosity of the playing, and the eloquently witty, playful improvisations, make I’ll Be Seeing You a highly-accessible, feel-good album that most closely captures the exhilaration of Regina Carter’s thrilling live performances.

Regina Carter is the most celebrated jazz violinist of our day, who has routinely been voted by critics and readers alike in the jazz magazines’ respective annual polls as the #1 Violinist for the past decade. Her first two recordings as a leader were on Atlantic Records, the second of which, titled Something for Grace, was also dedicated to her mother. Her wide-ranging, critically-acclaimed CDs for Verve include Rhythms of the Heart, Motor City Moments, Freefall (a duet CD with pianist Kenny Barron), and Paganini: After a Dream. Carter is one of the most successful touring and recording artists in jazz, who maintains a busy touring schedule, and an ongoing participation in music education initiatives bringing music to children and schools.

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Regina Carter - Ella: Accentuate The Positive (2017)

Regina Carter - I'll Be Seeing You A Sentimental Journey (2006)