Raya Yarbrough is clearly inspired by the
hybrid musical personality of Cassandra Wilson, who spent
the better part of twenty years exploring alternative repertoire
to the standard fare, mining such sources as Sting, The
Band, and even the Monkees. Wilson injected her work on
these songs with healthy doses of the blues and roots American
music, so that she always brought a new depth to popular
music, something jazz musicians have always done.
Yarbrough, an LA-based singer and songwriter, is attuned
to all kinds of music, from early blues and jazz to more
modern sounds, including reggae and chill out electronic,
and she is able to blend them in ways that display her talent
as a singer while keeping her sound fresh and relevant.
She opens with guitar-backed blues on “Lord Knows
I Would,” a tune that demonstrates the genre-bending
sound of her backing group, which includes guitarist Takeshi
Akimoto, pianist John Kirby, bassist Kaveh Rastegar, and
drummer Nate Wood. Besides vocals, Yarbrough also plays
acoustic guitar and some piano on this disc. Things widen
a bit sonically on the reggae-tinged “You’re
So Bad For Me” as Kirby provides a funky clavinet
that melds rhythmically with Akimoto’s guitar work.
The musical vistas continue to widen on a
languid, electronic-influenced version of Clifford Brown’s
“Joy Spring.” "Though of course I'm a fan
of jazz, I'm also into a few electronic artists who work
with manipulated sounds,” explains Yarbrough. "I
was aiming for that effect on this song. I wanted to do
something really outside the box with this classic bebop
tune." She succeeds very admirably, making one listen
to this tune in a completely new way.
Similarly, she takes Queen’s song “Dreamer’s
Ball” and takes it through American musical history,
backing off the campy element present in the group’s
original recording. There’s early jazz, gospel, blues,
show tunes, all mixed in there, and vocally she sells the
song and its stylistic conceit in completely believable
fashion.
Yarbrough has an advantage in the fact that
she is a truly interesting songwriter as well as a consummate
vocalist and musician (all but one of the arrangements on
this disc are hers), and she shows it with standout songs
such as “Sorrow’s Eyes,” “Listen
Emily,” and the wicked “Vice and Vanity.”
All of these songs are lyrically interesting and have gorgeous
melodic components, something all too frequently missing
from today’s popular music scene. On the other hand,
she never approaches a standard without seriously considering
her approach, as heard here on “Mood Indigo”
and the Johnny Mercer/Woody Herman tune “Early Autumn.”
Ultimately it’s this mix of the classic
and the modern, performed with complete sincerity and a
lack of condescension toward either, that makes Yarbrough’s
disc so incredibly fresh and fascinating. In a sea of releases
by female singers, Raya Yarbrough’s stands out as
one that will be listened to well past this calendar year.
