"Five out of five stars.  Two thumbs up.  Highest possible rating.  Buy this one!" 

Angela Bingham featuring Kenji Aihara - Everything I Love
Reviewed by David R. Halliday – February, 2004

This isn’t a typical first album for a jazz singer – nor, for that matter, a typical second or tenth or thirtieth.  Duo albums featuring only one singer and one instrumentalist are rare in the history of jazz.  Ella Fitzgerald made a few excellent ones with such instrumentalists as Ellis Larkins, Paul Smith, and Joe Pass.  Tony Bennett made two great ones with Bill Evans.  And Jeanne Lee found a very sympathetic collaborator in pianist Ran Blake, with whom she recorded a classic album. Only two artists come readily to mind who have actually formed their musical identity as a duo: husband-and-wife team Tuck and Patti (guitar virtuoso Tuck Andress and singer Patti Cathcart), who have performed together as a duo for over two decades and released several successful albums.  But these are the exceptions that prove the rule.  The fact is that of the thousands of albums released by jazz singers, even knowledgeable jazz fans would be hard-pressed to name a dozen featuring only a singer and a single instrumentalist.

 

The major reason for that, I think, is that such albums are very difficult to pull off with any success.  They require two artists, first, who are capable of compelling attention without the support of a rhythm section and, second, who have formed an unselfish, telepathic rapport, in which individual egos are subordinated to the beauty of the music.

 

Angela Bingham and Kenji Aihara fulfill these requirements with spectacular success, and Everything I Love holds its own with any of the albums mentioned above.

 

Angela Bingham is my kind of jazz singer – a lover of both music and words, with the intelligence, talent, knowledge, discipline, passion, attitude and sense of humor to communicate that love directly to all but the dullest of sensibilities.

 

Jazz singers, it has been said, tend to be one of two types: musicians or actresses, each type having its strengths and weaknesses.  The musician, on the positive side, is likely to have great intonation, a fine range, and a considerable grasp of harmony and rhythm (whether intuitive or theoretical – in many cases both) – attributes that allow her to improvise with all the melodic inventiveness of an engaging horn player; on the negative side, this type of singer sometimes tends to trivialize the lyrical content of songs, subordinating the meaning of the words she sings to the modes, altered chords, angular phrasings and complex rhythms that form her musical flights of fancy. Even such great singers as Sarah Vaughan and Sheila Jordan have been accused of this shortcoming.  The reverse is true of the actress, who focuses on communicating the meaning of the words she sings, enunciating clearly, phrasing conversationally, as if she were talking to you, and leaving no doubt that she understands and means what she says.  Billie Holiday may be the quintessential example of this type.  Ida Lupino provides an extreme case in point in the 1947 film noir Road House, where she talks and sings her way through “One for My Baby” and “Again,” prompting Celeste Holmes’s observation: “She does more without a voice than anybody I’ve ever heard.”  And Ida does indeed put the songs across – better in some ways than more musical singers do - though her range is limited, her intonation a bit sketchy and her improvised phrases lacking in strictly musical interest.

 

Ideally, of course, a singer should be both musician and actress, combining the strengths and avoiding the weaknesses of both, and Angela Bingham approaches that ideal about as closely as anyone in my memory.  She sings in tune and enunciates with a clarity that makes each word perfectly understandable.  She improvises, at times altering the original melodies of the songs she sings but never to the detriment of their lyrical integrity.  She phrases conversationally, making the lyrics her own and creating the impression that she’s speaking her mind – and heart - directly to you, as if the two of you were conversing over cocktails or an intimate supper – without sacrificing any of a song’s musical interest.

 

She also possesses two other qualities that make her my kind of jazz singer: she swings and she can sing the blues.  When Angela steps onto the stage to sit in with a rhythm section that has been cooking all evening, there is none of the polite condescension among the instrumentalists that one often detects when a singer joins the band – none of those forced smiles of pseudo-cordiality that say, “Okay, we’ll drop the intensity-level and humor this chick through a couple of songs.”  No, when Angela steps onto the stage, the instrumentalists respond with the same genuine enthusiasm and respect with which they would greet a bad-ass horn player.  Angela is one of them, an equal, a key collaborator in the production of that elusive rhythmic momentum known as swing.  As to her blues singing, I’ve heard her cover recordings by Bessie Smith, Dinah Washington and Big Mama Thornton with consummate authority, belting, growling, shouting and cooing with all the audacity, sexiness and soulfulness that such songs require to bring audiences out of their seats, hooting and screaming for more.  What more could one ask of a jazz singer?   

 

The other half of this duo, Kenji Aihara, is one of the jazz world’s best kept secrets – a jazz guitarist’s jazz guitarist with the ears, chops, and imagination to respond spontaneously, creatively and deftly to any musical situation, consistently leaving his fellow musicians awestruck by the power, originality, lyricism and virtuosity of his playing.  I’ve heard him play with electric blues bands and retro-swing ensembles (a la Django Reinhardt), demonstrating a combination of authenticity and inventiveness that jolts musicians and audiences alike into a state of pleasurable disbelief.  I’ve heard him toss off blistering heavy metal phrases with frightening dexterity and create shimmering new age atmospherics capable of lulling the most sensitive whale-savers and tree-huggers into a state of cosmic bliss.  And I’ve heard him play searing, extended, single-note solos on bop tunes that achieve a spellbinding cumulative intensity capable of astonishing the most experienced listeners.  I won’t go so far as to declare Kenji peerless, but I will confidently assert that not one of his peers – not Pat Metheny, not John Scofield, not Bill Frisell, not Mike Stern – could take the stage with Kenji and cut him.  Kenji, of course, would politely deny all this.  Like many gifted perfectionists who know they haven’t reached perfection, he is a quiet, self-deprecating man who upon learning what I’ve written about him here will likely look down, chuckle quietly, and gently recite an exaggerated litany of his musical shortcomings.  But that’s Kenji.  As I - and all the talented musicians who’ve played with him - know, an objective list of Kenji’s musical shortcomings would be the envy of any dedicated jazz guitarist.

 

This album highlights the quieter, more intimate side of these two musicians’ art, but it is a side that they have honed collaboratively for over a year and a half, in their weekly gig at the Zanzibar and in numerous other venues, developing the telepathic rapport necessary to maintain the kind of consistently compelling, spontaneous musical dialogue that has won them a loyal following of discerning fans.  That spontaneity is beautifully captured on this album, recorded “live” in Mark Fasbender’s analog studio, with no “isolation” between the two artists, meaning that they were not recorded in sound-proof booths, on separate tracks, in the “safe” method most commonly employed these days to allow the artists to go back after an initial take and fix their mistakes.  There are no such “fixes” on this album because both artists were recorded simultaneously, in the same room (Angela refused even to wear headphones!), with the same microphones, making such “fixes” impossible.  But, as you’ll hear when you listen to this album, none were needed.

 

Everything I Love is so consistently fine that each listener will have his or her own favorites.  If allowed to name just one, I’d pick the Rodgers and Hammerstein tune “I’m Just a Girl Who Can’t Say No,” from Oklahoma, an unlikely song for a jazz singer to perform; in fact, I can’t recall ever hearing one do it before.  But Angela wanted to do this normally bouncy little ditty, knowing she could make it her own by performing it as a ballad.  And Kenji’s fertile musical imagination responded with the interpolations of the Erik Satie pieces, uniquely enhancing the mood of languid resignation that Angela brings to the lyric.  I’m also partial to Angela’s bluesy treatment of Duke Ellington’s "I’m Just a Lucky So and So,” with Kenji’s acoustic guitar evoking a lazy Mississippi summer, his gorgeous modulation introducing Angela’s vocal and his walking bass line on the Burke-Van Heusen “Like Someone in Love,” the two guitar parts he recorded over the initial Joni Mitchell-style take of the Cole Porter title track (the only overdubs on the album) that demonstrate not only his stellar chops but also a formidable orchestral conception, the plaintive clarity of Angela’s voice on Antonio Carlos Jobim’s “Dindi” and Hoagy Carmichael’s “Skylark” . . .  Enough said.  Listen for yourselves.

 

Five out of five stars.  Two thumbs up.  Highest possible rating.  Buy this one!

 

David R. Halliday – February, 2004

 

David R. Halliday, now a retired resident of Salt Lake City, Utah, taught the humanities at De Anza College, Cupertino, California for twenty-five years, during which time he produced the award-winning San Francisco Bay Area TV jazz show Professor Video, and hosted the jazz and blues radio show Night Train, on KDVS, University of California, Davis.