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Jody Blackwell: Come and Gone

Jody Blackwell’s website tells us she’s moved more and more from folk towards jazz and R&B. That’s clearly perceptible on her new album ‘Come and Gone,’ released on the surprising Trespass label. Not for nothing on the cover picture the singer is sitting beside a guitar model closely resembling a Gibson ES-175, a guitar quite a few jazz guitarists, amongst others Wes Montgomery, played. The jazz drenched compositions and the really phenomenal instrumentation on ‘Come and Gone’ showcase a certain relaxation and lassitude. A good example is in my opinion the blues-tinged ‘So Glad.’ It’s hardly possible to play a funky rhythm guitar in a lazier way and the rhythm section is following
seamlessly. By the way, there’s marvellous solo guitar playing on this track.

‘So Glad’ is just one of the many beautiful tracks on the album and all are written by Jody Blackwell herself. The modest ‘Tender’ opens lovely with a Fender Rhodes and in this song Jody Blackwell shows she’s got a strong trump in hands, that is her voice. Closely
resembling Carole King’s voice, but she adds enough nuance of her own. Her vocal achievement are beyond dispute, I can hardly hear any shortcomings in her singing. She comes across in a very convincing way in both lower and higher regions.
I’d derogate from her merits if I’d just describe her record as ‘a perfect record for a long car drive,’ because the songs deserve a close listening. Nevertheless this disc is doing great in my car. The song ‘Inconvenient,’ at times reminiscing Steely Dan, clearly exhibits the aforementioned relaxation. Next to that there are other examples on the album that make a long car drive with Jody Blackwell’s ‘Come and Gone’ a perfect way to relax a busy week.
Clearly much care has been given to the exemplary production by Brian Charles and Jody Blackwell herself. Truly worth a great compliment, beause the cd really sounds marvelous. The cd is nicely packaged as a digipack with that glossy cardboard covering that I always find to have a special and pleasant smell. This obviously is just to reveal a secret joy of myself, but let’s be clear: Jody Blackwell deserves true recommendation.
‘Come and Gone’ is just a lovely record that I can easily recommend whole-heartedly.
You can buy the record at cdbaby, http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/jodyblackwell amongst
others.

(Ed Muitjens, http://www.johnnysgarden.nl)

From the March issue of 3rd Coast Music : (for more info on 3rd Coast Music and to see cover of issue, click here)

You may have noticed that music writers and DJs commonly mark the New Year by putting out or programming ‘Best Of’ lists or spotlight shows of the previous year’s albums, and you may have noticed that the FAR reporters and I are no exceptions. It’s not just that new releases tend to get very thin on the ground round the turn of the year, it really is an opportunity to look back, take stock and reflect on which albums we chose to write about or play and to highlight some of them with a little extra ink or airplay.
I can, of course, only speak for myself, but the process of creating JC’s Best O’ starts with going through the previous year’s issues of 3CM and making preliminary lists. I’ve noticed with the FAR reporters that a few of them come up with albums they didn’t report to the monthly charts, which I assume means these are sleepers that snuck up on them gradually, but I keep it simple. If I didn’t review it, it doesn’t get considered. As I use the same format as the FAR & Away reports, these lists, which invariably start out rather longer, have to be cut down to six in the Album of the Year category, three in all the others. This is never easy.
Looking at 2010’s offerings, I started off with 13 contenders for Album of the Year, so right there I had a problem. OK, first off, a little tactical voting. Eilen Jewell’s Butcher Holler; A Tribute To Loretta Lynn (Signature Sounds) and Blaze Foley’s Sittin’ By The Road (Lost Art) were no-brainers for, respectively, #1 VA/Tribute Album and #1 Reissue/Historic Album, which took care of them. Then Yvette Landry’s Should Have Known (Soko) and Zoe Muth & The Lost High Rollers (SonicBoom) were both Debuts, so they got the top spots in that category. Now things are looking a little better, I’m down to nine, of which, reluctantly, I had to move New Mystery Girl ‘s Twist City (self) into Debut as well, a bit of a technicality as Chrissy Flatt does have albums out under her own name, but at least she got a #1 for Sally’s Rumble as Song of the Year.
Now, there are only two albums that have to go, but which two? Better way of looking at it, who absolutely has to stay? Much easier: Sarah Borges’ Live Singles (self), Marti Brom’s Not For Nothin’ (Goofin’ [Finland]/Ripsaw), Caleb Klauder’s Western Country (Quicksilver), Carrie Rodriguez’s Love And Circumstance (Ninth Street Opus), Les Sampou’s Lonesomeville (self) and Sally Spring’s Made Of Stars (Sniffinpip). Now we’re getting somewhere, except for the really hard part, ranking them. I don’t know how many combinations I tried out to see how they looked, though early on I abandoned numbering because that was next door to meaningless, but eventually I hit on Sampou, Borges, Brom, Spring, Rodriguez, Klauder and that seemed about right.
So why Les Sampou, who only made #2 in the FAR charts and #6 in FAR & Away? Actually, there’s an easy answer. What swung it her way was that while I’d loaded a couple three favorite songs from each of the other albums onto my iPod, I had Lonesomeville almost in its entirety, because I couldn’t decide which, apart from Sam & Alice, were the best tracks, and I was still listening to it when I didn’t have to (music writers are like sharks, we have to keep moving forward, forever hunting for fresh meat). This strongly suggested that, while its rivals were all extremely good, Sampou’s album was, in my opinion at least, if not actually perfect, at least within spitting distance of it.
There are, I imagine, few artists who don’t think that their latest album is the greatest thing since sliced bread, but I came to find that it’s actually quite difficult to discuss an album with an artist who already knows that you think it was the best one to cross your desk in an entire year. However, Sampou did shed some light on what made Lonesomeville so special. While she says of her four previous releases, Sweet Perfume (self, 1994), Fall From Grace (Rounder, 1996), Les Sampou (Rounder, 1999) and Borrowed & Blue (self, 2006), “every album is different,” one unifying theme in reviews of the first three (Borrowed & Blue was solo blues covers) was admiration for Sampou’s songwriting. In my original review (#163/252, August, 2010), I noted that while there were only nine tracks, all originals, “Sampou seems to be a shrewd judge of her own material (never a given with songwriters),” and, it turns out, she started out with 25 to 30 songs, paring them down to create an album with a theme, “The others were all over the place. This time, I picked the nine songs that best complemented each other.”
Sampou also lavishes praise on colleagues such as JP Jones, who has co-credit on the sinuous, mesmerizing title track. “I gave him the credit because he suggested slowing it down, which was absolutely the right thing to do.” She also lauds not just producer Chris Rival and the outstanding Boston musicians, notably Kevin Barry (guitars) and Jimmy Ryan (mandolin), who backed her, but singles out Ducky Carlisle, who mixed the album and helped her fine tune the vocals, to stunning effect.
“I’m extremely proud of it” is a fairly stock artist comment on a new album, but when Les Sampou adds, “there’s a shine around it,” she gets no argument from me, in fact I couldn’t have put it better myself. There was a time when I was leery about inviting people I’d never seen to perform at 3CM Presents, but this year I’ve thrown caution to the winds, because if Les Sampou (and Yvette Landy and Zoe Muth) are half as good as they sound on their records, they’ll knock our socks off. JC

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