Jazz lovers, fasten your seatbelts! One of the most beautiful female jazz vocals of modern era belongs to Melody Gardot. Her voice is not the only thing that makes her unique. Everything she touches comes from a different dimension where music is born at ease. From there it migrates to our ears where it lives in its full simplicity. This singer is another evidence that the most intense music experience comes from intimate tragedy, pain and catastrophe. After she had a car accident, she was tied to the bed for a while and became sensitive to the light and the sound. Melody had some trouble with memory. Buddhism and macrobiotic were her antidotes and recording this album was her main therapy.
Her albums are medicine for the ears that are bleeding from all the commercial shootings. Melody is a melody. I couldn’t think of a better genre for her to express herself rather than jazz. With her fourth album, she just continued with her polished work and proved that she is full of inspiration. Using love, pain and intimate tragedy as a subtext, everything is simple, crystallized and intelligent. Her perspective towards love is mature. We hear that she was disappointed before and she knows how to bear with it, she knows how to play love game. Currency Of Man is fully jazz album but there are some strong blues elements, especially on Bad News and Preacherman where she reminded me of Madeleine Peyroux. Don’t Talk and Same To You recall Nina Simone and Billie Holiday. The influence of Duke Ellington is notable in an opening track called Don’t Misunderstand.
It’s Gonna Come is, hands down, the best jazz track in the last couple of years (when it comes to female vocalists). Melody plays with blues and pop while she flirts with lyrics about love. If I Ever Recall Your Face is a little bit sentimental, full of despair and craving. Most of the songs are dedications for a man. Gardot manages to not be pathetic and pretentious and that is her biggest advantage. Burying My Troubles is the closing track of this intimate, touching, autobiography. Gardot concludes: love is worth all the pain and self-forgetfulness is worth all the music. I agree.
