A World Still Turning
ARTIST: Ian Shaw
Ian Shaw - vocals
Billy Childs - piano
Peter Washington - bass
Mark Fletcher - drums
Paul Bollenback - guitar
Eric Alexander - tenor saxophone
Mark Murphy - special guest vocalist
RECORDING:
Recorded by Katherine Miller and mixed by Roy Hendrickson
at Avatar Studios, New York City, June, 2003.
Assistant engineer: Peter Doris
Mastered by Alan Silverman, Arf!, New York
Produced by Todd Barkan
Associate Producer: Derek Kwan
Executive Producer: Darren Crowdy
Executive Producers for 441 Records: Kirk Imamura and Harvey Rosen
DESCRIPTION:
Ian Shaw is a soul singer in the best sense of that term. There
is truth and life in his voice, and he conveys the emotional resonance of
a song every bit as well as he shapes and contours the original melodies with
his personal brand of phrasing. Shaw possesses the musicality, articulation,
harmonic sophistication and supple sense of rhythm we associate with the most
urbane icons of our jazz vocal tradition, but with a little something extra:
an edgy, lived-in feeling that marks the work of singer-songwriters truly
beyond category.
Even though jazz is a music that thrives on danger, jazz
listeners can be notoriously unforgiving when they feel an artist is straying
too far afield, but throughout A World Still Turning Shaw defines
his own brand of truth, and it is compelling. Much as Sonny Rollins has made
a career out of transforming the most arcane pop curiosities into jazz standards,
Shaw has a keen and discerning eye for the fresh melodic and rhythmic possibilities
inherent in the popular music of baby boomers and Generation X-ers alike,
as well as those chestnuts that inspired his own archetypes such as Mel Torme,
Sarah Vaughan and Shirley Horn. He makes them all cohere in the manner of
the classic Tin Pan Alley/Jazz song-form idiom, draws them into his own aesthetic
(not the other way around), imbues each one with a sense of something personal
and emotional and lived-in, and more importantly, makes it all swing.
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