Now that jazz has attained snooty-concert-hall respectability, it's time to confront one inevitable downside: The music isn't much fun anymore. Neotraditionalists dispense it like cod-liver oil. The scholars solemnly transform tender ballads into mathematical abstractions. There are few entertainers. Once a primary soundtrack of urban experience, jazz no longer speaks to daily life: It's too professional to celebrate big-legged women or salt peanuts or man's quest for spirituality.
The trumpet player and singer Olu Dara – whose jazz credentials include turns with everyone from Art Blakey to big names of the avant-garde – is trying to change that. On his long-over-due major-label
Read More
debut, this veteran of several ideological jazz wars sings about juicy lips and the battles of the urban jungle, the taste of fresh okra and the soul-cleansing effects of a rain shower. He uses simple structures (the blues, familiar Caribbean dance rhythms) to tell stories about life, stories full of the sights and smells and details that jazz players often trample in their rush to impress.
Each of the vignettes on In the World From Natchez to New York exists in its own distinct musical zone. One song finds Dara rhapsodizing over lips that remind him of "Louisiana plums," while another, the country lullaby "Kiane," is sung with the weary, heart-heavy woe of a single parent trying to soothe an agitated child. Dara connects the dots between his Natchez, Miss., hometown and more-contemporary urban atmospheres, between the open exchanges of jazz and the droning pain of rural blues, between the percolating rhythms of the islands and the stately parade beats of New Orleans. He makes the kind of unpretentious cross-cultural hybrid that feels like real life. It's music powered by beating hearts and energized by radical collisions – the percolating 6/8 rhythm of "Jungle," for instance, features the rapper Nas, Dara's son, linking African music and hip-hop narrative in a profoundly new way. In the World is dedicated to the idea that no matter how much obtuse number-crunching goes on in the name of jazz, everybody's got to get that soul nourishment sometime. (RS 780)
TOM MOON
