169.00 PLN

LP-180G 33rpm:

Nr kat.: 289479466016
Label  : ClearAudio Records

Thomas Quasthoff's acquaintance with jazz goes back quite a while to when he sang the music in nightclubs as a voice student. This is an experience he shares with other classically trained singers, although not so many German ones. He sings (and speaks) American English essentially without a foreign accent, and he is justified in his claims that when he sings jazz, he sounds like a jazz singer rather than a classical singer singing jazz. Yet if that were all there were to it, his performances would be less compelling than they in fact are. Quasthoff has the great virtue of approaching standards as songs that have new and personal meaning for him. Indeed, the booklet notes that "all the songs included in the present release are closely related to his own experiences and points of view." The listener can speculate on exactly what that means, but what's beyond speculation is that there's a certain wide-eyed quality of discovery in Quasthoff's jazz singing that's immensely appealing. A greater challenge than learning idiomatic American English for a German singer is learning idiomatic jazz vocal devices for a singer trained in the classics. Quasthoff croons, slides, caresses the microphone, whispers, and bends tones with the best of them. His upbeat numbers (try Ac-cent-tchu-ate the Positive or They All Laughed) have a solid, chunky rhythmic quality, but perhaps most compelling are the chances Quasthoff takes on some of the slower pieces -- specifically Stevie Wonder's "You and I," which is a song heavily influenced by jazz, to be sure, but that also implies soul vocals in some of the explosive expansions of its melodic line. It is here that one realizes most fully that one is hearing a rare vocal virtuoso, and that one enjoys a rare vocal delight to its fullest.