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Kurt Elling - Nightmoves
- Nightmoves, from Kurt Elling, is his first album since leaving Blue Note label and it is a calming, meditative album filled with jazzy ditties, sure to be heard at your local blues/jazz club.
The title track has tenor saxophone from Bob Mintzer, drum work from Willie Jones III, piano play from Laurence Hobgood and sterling bass play from Rob Amster and Christian McBride. Elling paints the picture of two lovers in a motion picture acting out their relationship ups and downs, with lyrics like, “The music begins and the titles fade in starring you and me. The hero is struggling to say that his lady is far away in her prison of wishes. We love and we fight but all day for night just a masquerade. We’re real till the red light is off then we take our faces off like two clowns in a sideshow.” The message here seems to be love is a game, and just who we present to our partner might not be the real us in the harsh light of day.
On “Tight,” there is rhythmic piano work from Hobgood which is meshed with drum play from Jones III, for a tone that will hypnotize listeners with its exactness and measured flow. Elling seems to have misplaced his lady and is searching for her everywhere, and an air of suspicion hangs over the song, with lines like, “I don’t know where my gal is. Where can she be? What is she doin’? I been lookin’ and searchin’, askin’ questions all over town. My baby, I’m hopin’ she’ll be found, I’m on the loose and I don’t dig it, take my advice if you find a girl hold on tight.” Elling is advising listeners to hold onto their beloved, no matter what, and not to let her slip away like he might have.
On “Medley: Change Partners/If You Never Come To Me,” a slower, more sensual jazz beat is heard with help from guitar work by Guilherme Monteiro and bass play from Amster and McBride. Elling’s voice is like silk, but with a touch of melancholy, as he utters lines like, “There’s no use for a moonlight blues or the peaks where winter snows. What’s the use of the waves that will break in the cool of the evening, what is the evening without you, it’s nothing.” Elling emotes his pain and loss at not being with the one he loves, and that without her his life is meaningless.
“Undun” has drum play from Jones III, along with more tenor saxophone play supplementing Elling’s sexy musing about a woman who is going down a path she is unsure of, with lines like, “She’s come undun, she didn’t know what she was headed for and when she found what she headed for, it was too late. She’s come undun, she found a mountain that was far too high, she found out she couldn’t fly and it was too late. Now it’s too late she’s gone too far she lost the sun. She’s come undun.”
Kurt Elling’s Nightmoves” is a classy, relaxed album filled with smooth songs, some of which have blatant meanings and others listeners will have to analyze further to get the crux of what Elling is getting at.
Reviewer: Sari N. Kent
new
Reviewer's Rating: 9
Reader's Rating: 0
Reader's Votes: 0
Added: 4-Apr-2007
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