Oscar Peterson

[dusken]

Well she has quite an impressive band behind her. Mulgrew Miller and Jeff Watts are included.

She has her own site, too: Rene Marie

I will check it out when I am home.

[nairi]

Oscar doesn't happen to be black, does he? ...

[dusken]

Yes, he is black.

[anileve]

Take a look at this, I knew I wasn't the only one thinking the same thing, the author just phrased it so much better. And I do agree, her perfomance is vocally very sensual and passionate with that edgy "lip-biting" effect.

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Vertigo
René Marie | MaxJazz 114


Ms. Marie serves up a release even more satisfying than her delectable debutHow Can I Keep From Singing.

Laverne Butler, Carla Cook, and now René Marie have all released their second recordings for the MaxJazz Vocal Series. Ms. Marie is following up her 2000 releaseHow Can I Keep From Singing(MaxJazz 109) withVertigo, another collection of provocatively chosen standards and originals. Outstanding from her debut on MaxJazz was her steamy, sexually charged delivery of Santamaria's “Afro Blue.” Added to that reading was the cusp cover of “Tennessee Waltz,” delivered in a lip-smacking multicultural, multi-genre style made famous by Miles Davis, Cassandra Wilson, and now perfected by MaxJazz. OnVertigo, this cusp cover is the Beatles's “Blackbird,” which Ms. Marie expels slowly and effortlessly as if in a single breath. Joined again by pianist Mulgrew Miller with bassist Robert Hurst and Drummer Jeff Watts along for the ride this time, Ms. Marie further out on the limb of artistic risk taking, largely with positive results.

René Marie displays her torch singing stripes on several pieces, beginning with the disc opener, “Them there Eyes,” which she scats through in a scorching manner and “I'd Rather Talk About You”. R & H's “Surrey With The Fringe On Top” is delivered in a folksy down-home manner. “I Only Have Eyes for You” is given a slight Bossa treatment by guitarist John Hart and Chris Potter provides brilliant minimalism to the minimalist “It's Alright With Me.” The title piece, a Marie original, is an angular, off center quest for love. Chris Potter's tenor makes this piece even more dizzying.

The composition and delivery are polyrhythmic to the extreme and capable of inducing vertigo. The disc centerpiece is without question the pairing of “Dixie” with “Strange Fruit.” Some critics have considered this coupling controversial. There is nothing controversial about it. It is a brilliant irony, juxtaposition, transmogrification, or whatever 25-cent word one wants to apply. Ms. Marie opens the medley with an unaccompanied rendering of “Dixie” that she pulls through the Blues, Spirituals and Gospel traditions with a lighted torch. “Strange Fruit” is taken as a slow New Orleans March, a “St. Vincent's Infirmary” as a drum march. Jeremy Pelt's trumpet echoes Satchmo and King Oliver, screaming with Marie as she sings of the “smell of burning flesh.” Beautifully done and worth the purchase price of the whole disc if for nothing else. This disc is a worthy follow-up to her debut and proves Ms. Marie one of the great high-wire acts in jazz today.
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Amen!

Article

[Tres Bien]

Oscar Peterson, sounds like a swedish name.Is he a swede?

[nairi]

Oscar Peterson, sounds like a swedish name.Is he a swede?

It's probably the name of his ancestors' master, aka slave-owner.

The master may well have been a Swede.

[Tres Bien]

oh now i get it lol He cant be swedish, because he doesnt looked like a swede, simply Those swedes, haa! and they say they are so democratic and all that, and then they keep slaves!