Music Download

Blue in Green Sophomore slump? Not for Tierney Sutton. After a memorable debut in Unsung Heroes, the willowy singer of elegant purr and urgent phrasing focuses on an even more intensely personal project–singing a well-paced set of 14 songs, all but one written by or associated with legendary pianist Bill Evans. Tierney maneuvers her hand-in-glove trio (no guest horns) through Evans’s ineffable book, and comes up with a date that’s perfectly relaxed and fitting. She sidles through quiet moments and breezy bits, engineers tempo shifts, applies gentle gestures, and edgily improvises. Instrumentals like “Very Early” and “We Will Meet Again” earn fresh lyrics from Sutton and others, yet Tierney manages to evoke Evans’s disquieting genius at each turn of phrase, as pianist Christian Jacob, himself cut of Evans-esque velvet, counters with arching, heartfelt lines, sometimes eerily evocative of the master. Each tune sets a unique internal pulse, a rhythmic point-of-view that invests the arrangement with individuality–fleet dotted-eighths on “Autumn Leaves,” a tentative ostinato on Miles Davis’s “Blue in Green,” a slinking “You and the Night and the Music”–all obliquely recalling Evans own inimitable, unmistakable phrasing. Knowing touches include inviting in Evans’s last drummer, Joe LaBarbera, to airbrush “Waltz for Debby/Tiffany,” overdubbing harmony and adding a bass on “Sometime Ago,” and daring to air back-to-back ballads, as Evans often did. As tributes go, she’s mined pure gold. –Fred Bouchard
Customer Review: Where angels fear to tread
Like Karrin Allyson’s tribute album to John Coltrane, Tierney Sutton’s tribute to Bill Evans places extra demands on the listener. Both albums offer ample testimony that the state of jazz singing in the post-Ella-Sarah-Carmen age is indeed well. But both recordings also force the listener to try to forego comparisons with their respective muses.

The Salvation Blues Here starts the third stage of Mark Olson’s recording career. He first came to prominence as the primary singer-songwriter for the Jayhawks, before leaving that seminal alt-country band to make music with his wife, Victoria Williams, in the more acoustic, organic Creekdrippers. With his reedy voice and elemental imagery, Olson details the painful dissolution of that marriage on this solo album, clinging to music as a lifeline when everything else is lost. In the album-opening “My Carol,” he compares his love to “an animal bleeding in the snow,” while “National Express” asks “Where’s my home? How could I lose this in a day?” Yet musically, “Clifton Bridge” and “Winter Song” rank with the best of his Jayhawks work, and both the title track and “Look into the Night” find redemption in the midst of despair. Gary Louris joins his former Jayhawks bandmate for harmonies on three cuts. –Don McLeese
Customer Review: A Treasure
I love this album. There is pain in it, there is hope in it. Mark lays it all out. I get a knot in my throat when I here it.
Customer Review: Nervous Music
Mark Olson’s “Salvation Blues” begins with the weeper “My Carol” and continues with tracks like “Poor Michael’s Boat” and “National Express” that have Olson’s nervous vocals with his high and thin voice. The songs “Keith” and “Sandy Denny” appear to be musical biographies of people with problems. While I like this acoustic folk genre, neither Olson’s voice nor his songwriting connect with me in much the same way that I’ve shelved all the Jayhawks CDs after a couple of listenings. “My Salvation Blues” sounds like nervous music for nervous people. It doesn’t strike me as overly original or likeable. However, I do like the photography in the booklet. On the closer “My One Book Philosophy,” Olson’s vocals are particularly painful. I fail to relate. Taxi!