A sneaky peak of just some of what is in the May 2013 issue
Etana
The ratio of female to male artists from Jamaica has never been great, and a woman who can write hit songs as well as sing them is even more of a rarity. Etana has been doing that for the past five years, ever since songs like Roots and Wrong Address heralded the arrival of a major talent. She was exceptional from the start, and proves it once more on her latest album for VP Records, Better Tomorrow.
Recorded at Tuff Gong studios with a group of young musicians, some say it’s her best collection yet…
Joshua Redman
There are certain things that just about every improvising artist, particularly horn players, say. The general consensus on the art of playing slow and tender, for example, is something on which he has an opinion worth hearing.
“It’s a cliché that a ballad is the hardest thing to do as a jazz musician, but like most clichés there is a truth in there,” Redman comments. “And it is. You are exposed. You are exposed sonically, you’re exposed emotionally There is a fine line…”
Laura Mvula
She keeps on doing it: Laura Mvula just won’t stop putting herself down.
“From a young age, I knew I wasn’t particularly gifted,” she advised the BBC recently of her vocal ability. “I’m not very articulate,” she admitted to Elle, concerning the alleged simplicity of her lyrics.” I don’t know which way the microphone should go up and I’m rubbish at talking between songs,” she has said of her live performance.
Good job nobody is listening to her: she’s just sold out a UK tour and is sitting high in the albums chart, with an album that busts across genres for fun…
Valerie June
Is this truly the image of a newly breaking artist whose striking blend of acoustic country, blues and soul sounds like it came right out Deepsouthville, USA, from, maybe, the thirties or forties?
Well, yes, actually it is. This infant of the eighties is exactly that: Valerie June, born in Jackson, Tennessee and raised in Humboldt, a little town about 90 miles east of Memphis and around 140 west of Nashville, has rejected the R&B, hip-hop and neo-soul of her peers and, after a brief, very early Whitney fixation, drifted through sixties icons like Joplin, Hendrix and Lennon before discovering, and sticking with, as she describes it, “raw, old country and blues music [that] I never got out of.”
