CHANGES – CD Review

By Ricki C., Invisible Hits Hour

June 2012

Carmen Lundy’s new CD release, Changes, most assuredly lives up to that title.  Lundy’s last release on Afrasia Productions, 2009’s Solamente, was, as the name suggests, a totally solo effort.  Ms. Lundy played all of the instruments on the record (piano, bass, guitar, & drums), wrote all of the tunes and sang every vocal track.  (One would imagine she probably also made coffee for all of the sessions.)

On Changes, though, Lundy brings her road-tested, battle-ready trio – Anthony Wonsey on piano, Kenny Davis on bass and Jamison Ross on drums – along for the party.  And the results of that are kinetic indeed.  This is the sound of living, breathing musicians communicating and interacting with one another and with the listener in concise, but open-ended arrangements.  The give and take between pianist Wonsey on Fender Rhodes electric piano and drummer-extraordinaire Ross on track two, “So Beautiful,” is particularly striking and worth the price of admission all on its own.  And bassist Davis shines on track eight, “To Be Loved By You,” providing the perfectly propulsive underpinning to anchor the tune.

Elsewhere on the record Carmen’s basic trio is augmented by Nolan Shaheed on trumpet & flugelhorn and George Bohanon on trombone.  Their trumpet/trombone duel/duet that closes track three, “Love Thy Neighbor,” is a shining example of the interplay between the musicians brought out by the songs Ms. Lundy has presented the band to interpret and a tribute to the mastery of those tunes.  This is no cut & paste, by the numbers, ProTools studio concoction woven together to mask flaws in the attendant musical ensemble, this is the sound of masterful musicians playing together with a love of music and passion for sound.

The production chores on Changes were handled by Elisabeth Oei, Lundy’s longtime musical collaborator. And the sonic sculpture Oei displays here is a model of clear, uncluttered, timeless production: This record could have been recorded and released in any decade from the 1960’s to today in 2012, in the best possible way.  We find no nods to any past or current passing or passé fashion here: No clumsy, grating, grafted-on jazz fusion sounds to tell us we’re listening to a 1970’s album; no electronic drum tracks to date us in the 1980’s; no hip-hop interpolations to make us “credible” in these years beyond 1990. 

One truly mind-blowing aspect of Changes is the fact that all nine tracks were recorded in only two days – June 13th & 14th, 2011 – by Lundy and her trio.  In these 21st century days where perfect production values are worshipped by many, a rock band might very well spend two days in the studio just arriving at a proper drum sound.  Which brings up another point: I’m a rock & roll guy, normally I don’t even listen to jazz releases.  But there is an underlying power and intensity washed through the melodicism of Carmen Lundy’s music that seduces even the rock fan in me.  Again speaking to jazzreview.com, Lundy said of the recording process, “I think the CD has a wonderful feeling.  I love the sonics, the sound of the record is great, I love the way that we recorded it, I love the whole energy and we had a wonderful studio setting because it was made of wood.  When you are making music the acoustics are much greater when you introduce a lot of wood into the recording setting.  We had such a warm feeling.  We had a great engineer and a great producer.  All the way along the line we had a lot of great components going into the making of this record.”  

And we haven’t even touched yet on the two most important aspects of the album; the sublime vocal stylings of Carmen Lundy and her masterful display of songwriting chops.  Whether she’s caressing the lyrics of “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square,” the record’s only non-original tune (reversing the normal order of jazz vocalists’ standards-dominated repertoire) or deploying a scat solo in “Dance The Dance,” Ms. Lundy is totally in control of every aspect of the shading, nuance and beauty of her vocals.  She’s forceful and spirited on “Love Thy Neighbor,” drops to a languorous lower register on “Too Late For Love,” (which also features great muted trumpet obbligatos from Shaheed).  Lundy is playful and swinging on “To Be Loved By You,” and her vocal is augmented and enhanced by great successive solos by bassist Davis and pianist Wonsey.

Interestingly, on a record that in the liner notes Lundy says was informed and inspired by guitar – “As a composer, I accidentally stumbled on the complex textures in the sound of the guitar while teaching myself a few chord progressions.  I love the new and wonderful possibilities that are uniquely different from writing tunes on the piano as the primary harmonic instrument.” – only one tune features guitar, album closer “Where Love Surrounds Us.”  On that tune Oscar Castro-Neves, whom Lundy calls “my hero” in the liners, weaves a melodic tapestry around Carmen’s sensuous vocal.

More than anything, though, it is the depth and breadth of Carmen Lundy’s songwriting mastery that impresses this reviewer.  In an era where so many jazz (and even rock and pop singers, for that matter) vocalists seem content to live in and repeat the past, endlessly rehashing what has come before, Lundy strives to move forward with her songwriting and her voice.  On the matter of penning eight of the nine tracks on Changes, Ms. Lundy says, “Choosing to sing songs from another era doesn’t fulfill me.  I have to sing about the idea of how the music is evolving and what it is becoming.” 

With this record, Carmen Lundy has indeed made Changes we can believe in.

June 2012, Columbus, Ohio