The hey days of smooth jazz are probably over. It might not actually be that bad for an instrumental music lover like myself. Why? One thing I recalled (and disliked) from that era was that every "instrumental" tune has a "mandatory" female background vocal singing a "tag line" (usually the tile of the song) Guys like Najee, Marion Meadows or Boney James all did that. I suppose that was mandated by the radio stations and record company exec. Here are quotes from a Billboard magazine article from 2000:
"Vocals are what has helped make smooth jazz a mass-appeal format and make it something that people can listen to and defend for work-place listening" - Frank Cody, Broadcast Architecture CEO.For almost twenty years I barely listen to smooth jazz for this reason. I guess there is no more pressure to make smooth jazz a mass-appeal so the annoying background vocal has gradually disappeared. (Well, the record companies don't bother to hire and pay for those singers!) On the other hand, one or two "vocal-centric" songs on an album is totally acceptable to me. While I wasn't paying much attention to the scene in the last twenty years, a whole new generation of smooth jazz saxophonists have emerged. And I went to two live performances at Yoshi's just this month! Here are a few good new albums from them:
"If you listen to some challenging instrumental that you've never heard before, you can only take so much of that. You want the comfort of a song you know" - Anne Gress, WJJZ operations manager
- Vincent Ingala - Coast to Coast
- Jessy J - My one and only love. Check out her cover of (one of my all-time favorite band) The Cure's "Lovesong" Here is a post about it. I completely forgot this or I would have yelled out this when she asked what songs the audiences like on her new albums during her show last night! In addition to these new songs, she has also performed the hits from her previous albums, like the Tango Boy. She played mainly her tenor sax but also alto, flute and sang a few tunes! Very sweet voice, especially in Portuguese (her cover of the huge hit "Mas Que Nada" by Sergio Mendes. Everyone has heard this before)
- Michael Lington - Soul Appeal. Like a lot of smooth jazz musicians, he had a lot of success playing with singers outside of the genre, like Bobby Caldwell and Aaron Neville. It's no surprised that his band features a very good singer, whose main duty was actually playing guitar. Unlike Jessy J, Lington only played his alto (he is a Yamaha artist. So is my whole family :P Got a Yamaha piano, guitar, sax and clarinet at home) I enjoyed his story about playing on jazz cruise: the program was an all Beatles tribute. Like most people he's a fan and have no problem playing Beatles cover. However, he was last in line to pick a song to play. All songs he wanna played were picked and the one left was "Eleanor Rigby," which he considered really a string-centric rather than a sax type of song. Anyway, he came up with an arrangement that he actually satisfied with and performed that night. I loved it.
