JAZZ JOURNAL MAY 2012

5 ***** REVIEW

By Bruce Crowther

CLAIRE MARTIN

Too Much In Love To Care – Linn AKD 390

This is an outstanding album from one of the finest jazz singers in the world today. Over the years,  in her dozen plus releases,  Claire Martin has steered away from the Great American Songbook,  although those lucky enough to hear her live performances will know she sings the material regularly.  When she does,  approval is high and this has led her to present a complete set that will have special appeal to many.  These wonderful songs show no sign of their age;  certainly not in Martin’s sure hands.  Always a tasteful and glowing singer,  Martin offers here some most pleasing liquid melodies.  There are also her insightful interpretations of the lyrics; some deft,  some witty,  some deeply moving.  Whatever the songwriters had in mind,  Martin finds the essence and delivers what must be among the music’s definitive and most compelling performances.  If the singer’s virtues were not enough,  taking this CD into the upper reaches where superlatives are needed are the exceptional musician’s who join her here.  Throughout,  Kenny Barron is extraordinary,  playing a subtly supporting role that cushions Martin and ably enhances the omnipresent musical joys on display.  On a couple of tracks,  Barron is alone with Martin and here, as elsewhere,  his solos are superb.  The two Washingtons plays with the verve and understanding we have come to expect (but not,  I hope,  take for granted),  ensure that everything goes with uplifting swing.  Then there is Wilson,  who here and there brings his own special talent to the table.  To all this,  add very good liner notes by Will Friedwald and Linn’s impeccable sound and the resulting feast is one that anyone who cares about good songs,  beautifully sung and played,  must surely want.

By Ivan Hewett   28th April 2012

**** The Telegraph

Claire Martin is one of the few British chanteuses who can impress American aficionados,  and this CD shows

why.  It’s devoted to the Great American Songbook,  and includes some little-known gems.

Martin’s voice has a warmly seductive edge – when she sings “don’t be a naughty baby” in Embraceable

You,  it’s like an invitation to do just the opposite.

The much praised UK vocalist has a confident middle range, her phrasing is pin-point and on the pulse and a wisp of torch-song smoke curls round every syllable. There are few surprises on this New York-recorded set of upbeat ballads – the title is a sultry Latin swirl, “Embraceable You” lopes steadily, and even the slowest ballads celebrate love rather than mourn its loss. But with the Washington brothers rock-firm on rhythm and Kenny Barron the epitome of jazz taste on piano, the delivery is immaculate.

Claire Martin

Too Much in Love to Care

(Linn) ***

Following the sell-out performances of our John Lennon Songbook concerts, the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra returns with a very special evening of songs by the world’s greatest song writing duo… John Lennon and Paul McCartney, in McCartney’s 70th Birthday year.

The young and highly original Joe Stilgoe joins the vocalist roll call, alongside award-winning jazz singer Claire Martinand Liverpool favourite, actor and vocalist Mark McGann. Join us for this rare opportunity to hear all your Beatles favourites, including Penny Lane, All You Need Is Love,Yesterday, Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds, Strawberry Fields Forever and more, accompanied by a full symphony orchestra.

Too Much in Love to Care (Claire Martin sings with Kenny Barron) is the new studio recording from Britain’s First Lady of Jazz, Claire Martin. This, her first US studio recording for fifteen years, sees Claire joined by an all-American, all-star quartet, featuring renowned jazz pianist Kenny Barron, “The most lyrical piano player of our time.” (Jazz Weekly). Recorded at Avatar Studios in New York City, one of the greatest recording facilities in the world, Too Much in Love to Care marks the first time that Claire has recorded an entire album dedicated to The Great American Songbook, even though she has performed many such songs as part of her live repertoire throughout her incredibly successful career. Acknowledging the audible sigh from her audience whenever she embarked on a well-known classic, Claire decided to take the path of least resistance here and present a complete album of standards.

Keen to convey a positive message throughout, she carefully selected a set of ballads all of which carry an optimistic note. It’s fitting that Claire is surrounded by a quartet of world class musicians, including piano legend, Kenny Barron. A long-time hero of Claire’s, he brings immense gravitas and style to the recording; his effortlessly cool and sensitive playing the perfect complement to the smoky elegance of Claire’s vocals. The rhythm section comprised Claire’s dream team of Peter and Kenny Washington and the hugely talented Steve Wilson guested on saxophone and flute. Together they have delivered a beautiful and tender collection of ballads. Impressively, at least half of the songs presented are first takes (astonishing, considering this was the first time they played together) and the incredible musical synergy between Martin and Barron is immediately apparent on record. Recently appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in the Queen’s Birthday 2011 Honours List for her services to jazz, Claire Martin has been a driving force behind the UK jazz scene for the past 25 years and has won many accolades, including a British Jazz Award no less than six times.

CLAIRE MARTIN – TOO MUCH IN LOVE LINN RECORDS (Linn AKD390) 30TH APRIL 2012

For review copies/interviews etc. please contact Dorothy Howe Press & Publicity Tel: 020 8995 3920 Email: press@dorothyhowe.co.uk

First Review by Chris Parker of ‘Too Much In Love To Care’  April 2012.

Noting what she terms ‘a faint audible sigh of relief whenever I start

singing something familiar at gigs’, Claire Martin has finally

succumbed to this politest form of pressure and recorded (for the first

time) an album entirely devoted to the Great American Songbook. The result

will undoubtedly delight said sighers, for not only does Martin herself turn

in a flawless performance, but she has also enlisted the services of

arguably the greatest living interpreter of such material, pianist Kenny

Barron, impeccably supported by bassist Peter Washington, drummer

Kenny Washington and flautist/saxophonist Steve Wilson.

Beginning with a relatively obscure standard, the Kriegsmann/Coates

title-track (‘virtually untouched since Carmen McRae recorded it in 1954′

according to liner-note writer Will Friedwald), Martin subsequently ventures

into more familiar territory, including an affecting duo with Barron on the

evergreen ‘Embraceable You’, a touching visit to ‘How Long Has

This been Going On?’ and – a triumph of revitalisation, considering how

frequently it’s been recorded – a perfect rendition of ‘I Only Have Eyes

for You’.

Martin’s great strengths – crystal-clear diction, an

apparantly informal ease of delivery that conceals considerable art, an

ability (springing from a keen

intelligence) to inject precisely the right amount of emotion into a lyric -

are all on display throughout a thirteen-song set, and with the Washingtons,

Wilson and the peerless Barron (characteristically combining luminously

delicate lyricism with sparkling vigour as required) in top form, this is an

unalloyed treat from start to finish.

Claire sings for one night only at her favourite London jazz club.

With Gareth Williams on piano,  Arnie Somogyi on bass,  Dave Ohm on drums

and Jim Mullen on guitar.  Book now on:  0207 439 0747

Claire will be singing material from her forthcoming release “Too Much In Love To Care”.

and signing CD’s.

‘Too Much In Love To Care’ (Linn Records) will be available next Spring. Featuring jazz legend Kenny Barron on piano and an ALL STAR line up of Kenny Washington on drums, Peter Washington on bass and special guest on sax and flute Steve Wilson. Claire will be touring the album throughout 2012.

Claire was awarded the OBE for services to Jazz Music by HRH Prince Charles at Buckingham Palace on December 14th 2011.

Claire would like to wish all her friends, family and fans all the very best for 2012 and a HUGE thank you for all their support.

Prom 71: Tribute to Stan Kenton – Review
Royal Albert Hall, London

Claire Martin and Richard Rodney Bennett: Witchcraft (Linn Records)
by Christopher Loudon
JazzTimes.com, June 8, 2011

When Britain’s foremost jazz singer meets the island’s most imaginative composer, the outcome is always stellar. When their latest pairing is constructed entirely around selections from the Cy Coleman songbook, the results are that much more spectacular. Bennett is more prominent throughout, providing elegantly insightful piano accompaniment on all 14 tracks, taking vocal lead on four and duetting with Martin on four more. Martin’s solo vocals are, befitting her interpretive dexterity, wider ranging, extending from the tender heartache of “I’m Gonna Laugh You Right Out of My Life” and “With Every Breath I Take” to the sardonic self-berating of “Nobody Does It Like Me” and the romantically insouciant “When in Rome.”

Best, however, are the duets. When her smokiness wraps itself around his gruff growl, the results evoke the vivacious sophistication of Julie Wilson and her longtime playmate William Roy (who, back in 2000, also paid lively tribute to Coleman). Martin and Bennett take a gleeful stroll through “Ev’rybody Today Is Turning On,” Coleman’s slyly cross-generational salute to recreational substances. But their harmonic virtuosity is even better explored across “The Best Is Yet to Come,” “The Rules of the Road” and the title track, their dazzling thrust and parry ingeniously choreographed.

Claire Martin & Richard Rodney Bennett: Songs of Irving Berlin
The Oak Room (at the Algonquin Hotel)
59 W. 44th St., (212) 840-6800
Through June 18

Irving Berlin was obsessed with simplicity; playwright Anita Loos famously described how she witnessed him endlessly rewriting and rethinking a song to make it as simple and direct as possible. He would have loved the British team of singer Claire Martin and pianist-occasional vocalist Richard Rodney Bennett, who are doing a program of his songs at the Oak Room. In the case of this duo, voice (usually one at a time) and piano are all you need; bass, drums or horns would only be intrusive. The open format exposes both the performers and the songs—there’s no place to hide, no additional instruments to cover up any shortcomings, and it wouldn’t work if Berlin’s songs weren’t so brilliantly constructed to begin with. The result is a kind of perfection that’s anything but minimalist. Further, Mr. Bennett in particular shows that even Berlin’s least known works, like “Lonely Heart” (from “Thousands Cheer”), are as expertly constructed as the hits.

Berlin is often listed as a member of the famous Algonquin Round Table, those celebrated wits of the Jazz Age who convened in the very same Oak Room. Yet I don’t imagine the songwriter spent a lot time guzzling cocktails and trading bon mots; he was much too busy writing songs. As Mr. Bennett points out in the show, the goal Berlin set for himself was to compose one new song every day. He may not have reached it, but by the time he was finished he had written what is estimated at about 1,500 songs.

In another famous anecdote, Berlin is having a drink with his fellow songwriter Cole Porter, and one of them asks, “Can you imagine that sometimes it takes two guys to write a song?” In being able to write both lyrics and music so brilliantly, Berlin was a kind of one-man duet. Throughout the opening-night set at the Algonquin, Ms. Martin and Mr. Bennett (who have just released “Witchcraft,” a new album on which they give comparable treatment to the marvelous music of Cy Coleman), showed the benefits of the duo concept.

It isn’t just the tension between voice and piano, but the amazing ways in which Ms. Martin uses her deep, sultry contralto to convey contrast. She has a sense of dynamics inspired by Tony Bennett (who I’ve seen at her performances), and knows precisely when to sound light and when to sound heavy, when to sound sultry and when to sound breezy. Rhythmically, she and Mr. Bennett (who, in his other career, is a Knighted composer of film scores and classical music) are even able to articulate the subtle difference between syncopation (as on the earlier songs like “When the Midnight Choo Choo Leaves for Alabam”) and swing (as on the later songs). She sings “Love, You Didn’t Do Right By Me” like a semi-comic air of self-deprecation rather than a typical torch song, and with a very dramatic pause after the first word. At one point on “Steppin’ Out With My Baby” (one of many songs the pair played from “Easter Parade”) Mr. Bennett accompanied her with just his left hand, which conveyed the feeling of a voice-and-bass duet.

Another duality is the contrast between the classics, like “Blue Skies” (which Ms. Martin sings with a scat chorus, à la Ella Fitzgerald’s Songbook version), and the obscurities, like Ms. Martin’s “Fools Fall in Love” (from Lee Wiley’s Berlin album) and Mr. Bennett’s “He Ain’t Got Rhythm,” which might be viewed as a caustic, glass-half-empty answer to the Gershwin brothers. The set also alternates between full songs and well-constructed medleys, like a mash-up of songs about giving in to temptation, “Get Thee Behind Me, Satan” and “I Got Lost in His Arms.” There’s also a medley of “Isn’t This a Lovely Day?” and “It’s a Lovely Day Today.” I was wondering why they’d omitted “It’s a Lovely Day Tomorrow” but then I realized that everything has its limits.

Wednesday 8th June 2011

Claire Martin and Richard Rodney Bennett at the Oak Room.    REX REED.

The New York cabaret season is humming to a close, but before waxing that bikini line and heading for the beach, take note: The big rooms are saving the best for last.

The finale for the Algonquin’s august Oak Room season features music so sublime it must not be missed. A whole night of Irving Berlin, sung to perfection by England’s best young jazz singer, Claire Martin, accompanied by the incomparable, knowledgeable and knighted Sir Richard Rodney Bennett. Ms. Martin looks, at some angles, like Jodie Foster, and when she stamps gorgeous movie songs like “Better Luck Next Time” (from Easter Parade) and “Love, You Didn’t Do Right by Me” (from White Christmas) with her own special patina, you know she’s on friendly terms with the cinema. Berlin wrote 15,000 songs in his salad days, so you can do only so much in a one-hour cabaret show. But when this dazzling Dreamsicle covers the territory, it stays covered.

Of course, it wouldn’t be Berlin without celebrating his favorite singer, Fred Astaire—their careers were so intrinsically linked. Sometimes Mr. Bennett joins Ms. Martin in inspired duets like “Let’s Face the Music and Dance” and “Let Yourself Go,” sounding like two Astaires instead of one. They both love to explore seldom-heard songs off the beaten track. From the Broadway show Louisiana Purchase, Ms. Martin breathes fresh oxygen into the obscure but haunting “Fools Fall in Love,” and on an old Alice Faye favorite, “He Ain’t Got Rhythm,” Mr. Bennett really hits his stride. With his conversational reading of “Say It Isn’t So,” he reaches the apex of his own musical imagination, and his arrangement of “What’ll I Do?” builds a rueful introspection for Ms. Martin’s voice to bask in. What a great way to wind up the season. They are to songs what sugar and cream are to coffee. With Claire Martin, Richard Rodney Bennett and Irving Berlin, sophistication is guaranteed. The burnished wood under the muted lights of the Oak Room glows as much as the audience.

Claire is delighted to have won for the 2nd year in a row the Vocal category for 2010 British Jazz Awards.

A very hearfelt THANK YOU to all who voted for her. Best Wishes and Happy Christmas to all the faithful jazz fans out there!!

Birmingham Jazz’s CBSO Centre programme has featured singers before – with Ketil Bjornstad, with the Heritage Orchestra, with Django Bates’s stomRMChaser band, for example – but this was the first time (I think… I am sure I will be corrected if I am wrong) that a singer had been the leader and featured throughout the gig. And Claire Martin was a particularly wise choice to break this particular duck.

Not only is she a supremely talented singer, she plays a role in her band that is very similar to an instrumentalist.

When you choose the Gareth Williams Power Trio as your band, you sure as hell know you are not booking a bunch of accompanists happy to hide their talents under a bushel and stay out of the way. Which is not to suggest that pianist Williams, electric bassist Laurence Cottle and drummer Ian Thomas are not exceptionally sensitive musicians, and not impeccable in supporting roles – just that they are just so much more than that.

The band hit hard from the start in a programme which featured quite a bit of their most recent disc, A Modern Art. It’s a strong mix of songs from the great American songwriters (both ancient like Rodgers and Hart, and modern like Fagen and Becker), plus lesser known contemporary writers (like Pat Coleman and Colin Lazzerini), and some from the pop world, too, like kd lang and Annie Lennox.

Martin also rightly referenced Carmen McCrae and Shirley Horn (I still laugh every time I remember the song Claire wrote for her album dedicated to the singer renowned for her larghissimo tempi – it’s called Slowly But Shirley) because she is very much a jazz singer in their mould.

If one song sounded slightly out of kilter it was Lennox’s Cold – just a bit too rockily dramatic for this context – and if one stood out in its musical complexity and thoroughly contemporary feel it was Lowercase, words by Mark Winkler and Lori Barth to a tune by Joshua Redman. The latter has a really lovely outro vamp.

Great solos from all four musicians, and a feeling of the thrill and pleasure of making spontaneous jazz music-making that is not always clear from the faces and manner of other bands. A life-affirming evening of sophisticated modern art.

THE JAZZ BREAKFAST

She ranks among the four or five finest female jazz vocalists on the planet (it wouldn’t be overstatement to ere cognize her as Anita O’Day’s rightful heiress), and on the rare occasion she performs stateside, the crowds are invariably SRO. So it’s hard to fathom why Claire Martin, a household name in her native U.K. and a perennial British poll winner, remains so under appreciated on this side of the Atlantic. Maybe it’s because those visits are so rare, or perharps because her albums aren’t always easy to find. Well, with the advent of iTunes, almost her entire output is just a click away. As a starting point, you’ll be hard pressed to do better than her latest release.

Though Richard Rodgers, notoriously finicky about re-interpretations of his songs would surely be enraged by the Everything I’ve Got Belongs to You which opens A Modern Art, Martin’s impishly funkified treatment is marvelous. The rest of the play list bows to more contemporary compositions, most notably Mark Winkler’s tenderly distressing lowercase and Cy Coleman’s delightfully wry Everybody Today Is Turning On. Lauren Kinhan’s affecting As We Live and Breathe is ideally mated with a sharp, Bossa reinvention of Steely Dan’s Things I Miss the Most.

Equally superb are two self- penned additions. Edge Ways provides brilliant, backhanded condemnation of the chronically self absorbed, while the title track offers delicious appraisal of modern society’s celebrity obsession and the corresponding devaluation of genuine artistry.

Claire Martin has won Best Vocalist at the British Jazz Awards 2009! The awards have always celebrated the best in British jazz and this year is no exception. The calibre of the musicians shortlisted indicates the excellence present in jazz in Britain today. Claire’s victory in the Vocal category is a true triumph – also nominated were the outstanding vocalists Val Wiseman, Norma Winstone, Liane Carroll and Clare Teal.

The awards were ultimately decided by public vote – magazine readers, gig goers, radio listeners and musicians all contributed. Claire said “I am thrilled to receive this award and honoured to be listed in the same group as Norma Winstone and Liane Carroll who are my favourite singers! Having your hard work acknowledged is always a bonus.  Thank you to all who voted for me, I’m very grateful.”

Britain’s leading female jazz singer, Claire Martin, released her new album, ‘A Modern Art’, earlier this year to glowing reviews. The Scotsman said “she is still a cut about the competition” whilst Time Out called it “her finest album to date”. Praise indeed for, as the Sunday Times called her, “the most gifted jazz singer this country has produced in 20 years”.