Emi
Makabe (voice, shamisen, flute); Thomas Morgan (double bass, backing vocals);
Vitor Gonçalves (piano, accordion, Wurlitzer electric piano); Kenny Wollesen
(drums, percussion, vibraphone, electronics) + Meshell Ndegeocello (MC on tks 2
& 9); Jason Moran (piano on tk 2); Bill Frisell (acoustic guitar on tk 1)
How can something be a
surprise if you don’t know what to expect in the first place? In any case, this
album comes as a surprise. Full of depth, imagination and emotion, it wanders
through jazz and several other types of music and the shamisen throws an anchor
back into Makabe’s Japanese roots. Most of all, though, it’s just a lovely
sound with her voice dominating proceedings whether in Japanese, English or wordless
vocalese with superbly sympathetic support from Gonçalves’ piano.
Of course, to confound that observation from the very start the opening melancholic ballad, The Birthday Song, has Makabe’s mellow, Linda Ronstadt-ish vocals surrounded by rolling bass and finely picked guitar (from Bill Frisell, no less). It’s a song of both loss and memory of her father who died during the Covid outbreak summed up in the line, “I'll sing a song with a face half smiling.”
Morisan bounces the
album into life. It’s all movement to reflect the dancer mentioned in the
(Japanese) lyrics. The piano pushes, bounces, trills, twists and turns and
Makabe’s voice soars above whilst the bass and drums march and charge in the
background. Mu is, again, a
reflection on loss and the words paint an image of self-destructive despair (“…how to ride this pain,” “Home is not home
anymore” and“…scratch my skin, I’ll
feel nothing”). It’s very raw and it almost feels like an intrusion into
private grief to listen in. Makabe’s flute is the other voice prominent here.
Dignity is more remembrance of happier times and threatens to burst into something filmic before it grows into a widescreen flowing ballad that escapes the constraints of the opening verse as Makabe’s voice takes off and the bass and piano lift her higher. Snow features the shamisen rolled up in a blanket of rich bass notes. It is thin and hollow, piercing the darkness before Ndegeocello reads a poem about loss, asking all the questions, the most pertinent of which is “Why?”
Scape has glistening electronics, Makabe’s ethereal wordless vocals and a comforting bed of that rolling bass again before a swirl of accordion leaves us in a delicate world of fragile vibes. A stronger vocal line from Makabe takes us to the end, rising and falling and the backing still all aglow. A charging flurry of cymbals takes us into Text westernand a winding flute line whose complexity is carried into the vocal line which in turn becomes an argumentative conversation in Japanese with the piano following every turn, keeping that conversation flowing, with the drummer providing percussive punctuation.
Letter is almost a
lullaby, full of hope and memories of friendship and the sort of secrets that
only close friends have. There are layers of elements to this with the vocals
the most obvious but beneath those is a swirl of delicate piano, the shamisen
adding it’s lines and, of course, Wollesen’s bass anchoring everything:
Morgan’s backing vocals provide a solid centre for Makabe to wrap her voice
around.
The title track features Ndegeocello
reading a simple short poem whilst Makabe lifts her voice onto a higher plain.
The shamisen rises and falls with her voice and the bass echoes both. The line「会いたいよ」(I miss you) simply sums
up the mood of loss across the album with the striking contrast of Ndegeocello’s
simpler delivery (in English) with Makabe’s emotion in her native Japanese.
A simple electric piano
motif opens Overture. Joined by the
floating vocal and that underpinning bass the mood is of hope and the lyrics
suggest that grief is not as eternal as may have been feared earlier.
An interesting album and worth forty minutes of anybody’s day. Emi Makabe folds the Japanese voices (hers and the shamisen) into more familiar western sounds in a way that serves her aim of conveying a depth of emotion unusual in jazz. Sadly, this is a real portrait of loss and the emotion is all too real. I would direct any casual listeners to the lyrics page for the album on Makabe’s website HERE which will help with understanding. Having said that the lyrics are spare, suggesting at emotions, rather than bold exposition. Dave Sayer
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