As I've said in a few recent editions of these best-of columns, it's been a dreadful year for most things but a fine one for music, which, as the verse contends, "has charms to soothe a savage breast, to soften rocks, or bend a knotted oak."
This album is as much cabaret, Renaissance, mystical, and folk as it is jazz, but it features Cécile McLorin Salvant, the greatest jazz singer (one of the greatest singers, period) of our time, so it would top the list of any musical genre (or come close).
Darcy James Argue has evolved into one of the era's top big-band composers, second only to Maria Schneider, and this, his fourth album, is his best to date: a work of stunning eclecticism and complexity...
[
add
]
[
|
|
...
]