Album reviews: Pop | Comedy | Jazz | Folk | Classical

Published on Sunday 26 December 2010 14:29

POP: VARIOUS ARTISTS The Original Soundtrack For Coloured Girls Atlantic, £12.99 **

A film based on Ntozake Shange's Obie Award-winning play from 1975 lines up a somewhat oblique all female selection to provide the soundtrack. The Main Title theme throws Janet Jackson and Whoopi Goldberg into a rather anonymous mix setting the undistinguished tone. Estelle, one-time Brit teen sensation sounds less than spectacular with All Day Long, while Macy Gray is more effective with a controlled performance on Stand Up.

Four Women is a diverting effort featuring the incomparable Nina Simone on auto pilot, before the bombastic stylings of Leona Lewis close proceedings with I Know Who I Am. Colin Somerville

Download this: Sun by Lalah Hathaway, La Donna In Viola

COMEDY

BOOTHBY GRAFFOE

Songs For Dogs, Funerals ****

Makin Projects, only through www.thereturnofboothbygraffoe.co.uk

Boothby is a lyrical humorist with refined musical sensibility. Looking like a younger, less malevolent Jeremy Paxman, he forged a career in stand-up where his guitar interludes gradually became the show with mere comedy decorations. I.C.C.E. (baby) fuses African jit guitar into a petrol-head rant, and the album features the best Anglified appropriation of such influences since Malcolm McLaren's Buffalo Gals. These songs are lyrically razor sharp and socially brutal, from Thank Your Insulin to What We Applaud In Disney Films We Would Kill People For Attempting In Reality. "Once is a mistake, twice is jazz," he sings. Refreshingly original. Colin Somerville

Download this: Sausage Fingers, Spelling Sheep

JAZZ:

CHARLIE HADEN QUARTET WEST

Sophisticated Ladies

EmArcy 0602527508160, 13.99 ***

Bass player Charlie Haden's quartet, which features Ernie Watts on tenor saxophone and master arranger Alan Broadbent on piano, is at the core of this star-studded if uneven album which boasts some sumptuous ballads with a string orchestra as well as beautiful vocal performances from a sextet of terrific singers, among them Diana Krall and Norah Jones.

The show is stolen by Melody Gardot's exquisite If I'm Lucky and, thanks to Cassandra Wilson, the rarely performed David Raksin-Johnny Mercer ballad My Love And I. Alison Kerr

Download this: If I'm Lucky, My Love and I

FOLK:

EMILY SMITH

Traiveller's Joy

White Fall Records WFRCD004, 12.99 ****

The young Dumfriesshire singer/pianist/accordionist and songwriter releases a new album for the legion of fans that love her clear, clean and elegant vocal style. It ends powerfully with a well-known unaccompanied lament for a woman's suffering in being abandoned by her lover, but elsewhere there are Richard Thompson and Rick Kemp compositions – and plenty of polished instrumental assistance, sometimes even giving the album a contemporary country feel. Norman Chalmers

Download this: Traiveller's Joy

CLASSICAL:

BRYN TERFEL

Carols And Christmas Songs

Deutsche Grammophon DG 477 8768, 12.99 ****

Just in time for some festive cheer comes this twin CD of carols and songs in English and Welsh. If some of the over-juicy orchestrations start to sound rather treacly after a while, Bryn Terfel's clear baritone tends to cut through the mush. Partnerships with Rolando Villazon, Gwawr Edwards and harpist Catrin Finch add to the texture, though the 'duet' with the late Bing Crosby in I'm Dreaming of a White Christmas' has a certain eerie quality. Of the solo songs, Still, Still, Still perhaps remains the most affecting.

A second CD of carols and songs in Welsh adds a particularly Celtic flavour, almost all of them repeats of works from the first CD. Hardly an adventurous selection, but solidly performed throughout. Alexander Bryce

Download this: I'm Dreaming Of A White Christmas