La Tanya Hall - Say Yes (2019)

I first heard the American singer La Tanya Hall last year in the album The Seasons of Being of her husband, Canadian pianist Andy Milne. But her own album Say Yes arrived, which La Tanya recorded with the new trio of Milna, called Unison. For the singer this is just the second solo album, and the first one was recorded back in 2009, ten years ago. Creative crisis? Not at all. It’s just that La Tanya was overloaded with other projects over the years. An associate vocal professor at the Oberlin Conservatory, she has also worked extensively with the Steely Dan group and with the most famous US vocalists, including Bobby McFerrin, Aretha Franklin, Harry Belafonte, Diane Ross and a number of other stars. To this we must add the busy schedule of our own concerts. And it so happened that it came to a new album only now.

Beautiful, flexible and strong, leave the voice and impeccable intonation out of brackets - this is evidence of both the natural talent and the high technical level of the vocalist. But the program of the album proposed by Hall is really not quite, sorry for the pun, is standard. That is, it also has classical jazz standards: I’ll name, for example, Cole Porter's Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye, but there are more pieces written in due time as purely instrumental and received the text later. This is Benny Golson’s Whisper Not with poems by the famous jazz critic Leonard Fezer, the famous Pannonica Telonius Monk with John Hendrix’s text, and a completely unusual version of Fitter Waller’s Jitterbug Waltz. Finally, the inclusion of folk rock stars in the program is not at all frequent for jazz vocalists: Because I Told You So Jonath Brooks and The Fiddle and the Drum, an old song by Joni Mitchell of the 60s, makes the program even more diverse and interesting. For me personally, the peak of the album was three tracks, from 5th to 7th, arranged in a row in the program: these are Whisper Not and Jitterbug Waltz already mentioned above, as well as the Softly song. But, this, as you know, is already taste preferences, and in Say Yes there are compositions that can satisfy the most demanding taste.