The Spirit Of St. Louis
Clichés have gotten something of a bad rap. Essentially, they're the most instantly recognizable attributes of any artistic endeavor.Louis Armstrong's were his sweetly gruff, speaking/singing voice and deceptively simple Dixieland jazz trumpet flourishes. TheManhattan Transfer's clichés are the group's slick jazz and harmonically perfect takes on the traditional vocal quartet. The common ground of this Manhattan Transfer tribute to Armstrong may not be entirely discernable at first listen, but that's the beauty of music--influences can sometimes reveal themselves in ways that surprise and delight the performer as much as the listener. Crucially, the veteran quartet wisely dispense with their sometimes predictable MO, allowing producer Craig Street (Me'Shell Ndegeocello, k.d. lang, Cassandra Wilson) to challenge them with a series of arrangements that wed vintage instrumentation to a distinctly non-vintage set of instrumentalists (including Los Lobos' Steve Berlin, modern jazz horn great Jon Hassell, Beck alumni Smokey Hormel, and adventuresome guitarist/loopist David Torn). The producer also allowed Transfer members to pick their own Armstrong favorites for interpretation, giving the band members unusually free solo spotlights (including Tim Hauser's one-take wonder "Blue Again," a deliciously lazy reading of "Sugar" by Cheryl Bentyne, Janis Siegel's "The Blues are Bewin'," and Alan Paul's playful "Gone Fishin'"). The result is arguably the Transfer's best album in a decade, one that fuses their impeccable vocal perfectionism to Armstrong's still vibrant and soulful legacy. The result is anything but a cliché.-- Jerry McCulley