Esperanza Spalding
Esperanza Spalding sings along with her own double bass.
Readers’ Opinions
With her album, "Junjo" (Ayva Music), Esperanza Spalding distinguishes herself in instrumental jazz in many ways: she's a bassist leading a band and singing wordless vocals at the same time; she has made a charming first record; she's only 21; and she's a she. The pianist Aruán Ortiz and the drummer Francisco Mela aerate the record, making it possible for you to hear her grooves and her counterpoint. It's not irrelevant to add that Mr. Ortiz and Mr. Mela are Cuban: they're modern jazz musicians, fluent in warping and stretching time but also in bringing a strong sense of dance to it. (She is American, Boston-based.) Her voice is light and high, up in Blossom Dearie's pitch range, and she can sing quietly, almost in a daydream. Her version of the folkloric Argentine composer Gustavo Leguizamon's "Cantora de Yala" draws you in to listen harder. Sometimes it's unnecessary to talk about gender in jazz, but leading a band from the bass has been a pretty masculine endeavor, and Ms. Spalding invents her own feminine space, a different sound from top to bottom.
Marvin Gaye
The lip-synced television appearances of Marvin Gaye on the DVD "The Real Thing" (Hip-O/Motown) aren't that interesting beyond this great soul singer's shyness about stagecraft and his refusal to move his body much while singing. Much better, obviously, are the concert clips. Here is a 1972 performance of "What's Going On," from the film "Save the Children," with a small, brilliant band that includes the bassist James Jamerson. The tune has a long breakdown in the middle with Mr. Gaye singing whatever comes to mind and playing piano over only congas. His vocals were always full of little micro-improvisations — the phrasing and timing of words like "sugar," "please," "baby" — but here is a macro-improvisation, and a good one.
Misja Fitzgerald-Michel
A Dutch-born guitarist living in France, Misja Fitzgerald-Michel is one of those people you'll hear about because of his chops: he plays fast, with a dry, resonant jazz-guitar tone. But before we reward speed, which is meaningless by itself, let's reward a well-made record, "Encounter," just released in the United States on Sunnyside. I'm not sold on his style yet. It's reflexively busy, chord-obsessed and doesn't have quite enough song in it for me. (The record includes "Countdown" and "Central Park West," two Coltrane tunes with the "Giant Steps" chord changes, which contain famously rapid harmonic motion. It's a demonstration of proficiency.) But the album has a just-transparent-enough feeling, such that you can hear the members of the quartet equally. The ingredients are nice: some solo acoustic covers of Ornette Coleman and Coltrane; trio music with the drummer Jochen Rueckert and the bassist Drew Gress, who both improvise right through their accompaniment; and on two tunes the saxophonist Ravi Coltrane's darting, ribbonlike lines, which make it a quartet. Any more — a pianist, say — would have made it too dense.
Herbert
The English electronic-music producer Matthew Herbert has made his best-known records by imposing strict rules upon himself about his sampling sources. Last year's "Plat du Jour," about the effects of globalization on how we eat, was constructed almost entirely from sounds relating to food and its production. The work made its point, and Mr. Herbert's formal control, from concept to execution, was fascinating. But "Plat du Jour" got stuck at the process level; it had a short life in the ear. Not so with "Scale" (Accidental/K7), whose tracks can have the sleek, funky surfaces of Prince or Basement Jaxx and come draped in sophisticated, 1950's-sounding orchestral arrangements, played by real instruments, incidentally. The underlying theme, he has said, is "the end of the oil age," and the music is sweeping and emotional. Some of the sound sources here include a gas pump, cars, a Royal Air Force bomber jet, and a coffin door closing (recorded as heard from the inside). But try to find them: they're hidden underneath all that sleek music and the sumptuous singing of his wife, Dani Siciliano. You could potentially hear the whole thing and not think about politics; once you're told what the record's up to, you can't stop thinking of romance as a gigantic metaphor for war, or vice versa.
