Dreamers

The vocal/guitar duo has been done well many times in the jazz history books: Helen Merrill and Gordon Beck, Ella Fitzgerald with Joe Pass, Jeanne Lee with Ran Blake, and many others too numerous to mention. All of the aforementioned collaborations worked within the parameters of jazz as a way of looking at its more warm and intimate dimensions. The pairing of the Chicago-born avant-garde vocalist Ellen Christi and Turin guitarist Claudio Lodati is 180 degrees from that approach. Christi is a relentless experimentalist. She uses her voice as a method of travel, not only to different musical and sonic landscapes, but spatial and atmospheric ones as well. Lodati, with his angular, knotty acoustic playing, is a willing accomplice, and a fine vehicle for Christi to travel with. Here are all manner of vocal styles shimmied together under the rubric of jazz: There are medieval polyphonic chants juxtaposed against shape note singing and jazz scat singing ("Run in a Circle"), there are plainchant sonorities crossed with open-toned whole-note singing underlined by timbral investigations of string harmonics and staccato syntax ("Sensa Parole"), and there are drifting soundscapes where melodic invention and counterpoint are ever-entwining considerations as elements of utterance themselves in both voice and string ("Africa"). What Dreamers is, then, is an album on which imagination is allowed a nearly free play of interaction with musical architecture and metalinguistic structure. As a whole, it can take the listener into spaces never before imagined when encountering the human voice. In part it can be disquieting and unnerving. Hence, it is a success on every level and should be regarded as the opening volley in a series of recordings that could open up entire vistas of jazz expression. ~ Thom Jurek|