AM 4: ...And She Answered, album review

Gorgeous Moan and Screams

I think it was through seeing/reviewing Norma Winstone that I got directed directly or indirectly to this album, and specifically the vocal of Linda Sharrock.

It is a beautiful as well as punchy set of tracks, Wolfgang Puschnig on alto saxophone, alto flute, hojak, shakuhachi, and Uli Scherer on piano, prepared piano, keyboards. Opener Streets and Rivers represents the soothing, caressing end, Sharrock’s spoken poetry a blissful journey through its describing, joined in tandem by Pusching in a tonal chorus, and Scherer providing a bed of musical droplets. Near the end of the song, Pusching raises the level on the sax, and Sharrock screams with this briefly, then yelps, and then moans along. It is gorgeous.

Second And She Answered: “When You Return To Me, I Will Open The Cage Door, I Will Let The Red Bird Flee” is an overdubbed sax bonanza with a brooding piano pulse, an instrumental at the other end of the mood spectrum.

Third is a sublime collaboration on Ornette Coleman’s Lonely Woman, Sharrock and Pusching in perfect vocal/sax tandem delivering the song’s lyrics added by Margo Guryan,

Lonely in the night she wanders
who can she tell of her heart-ache
They that listen do not care
They don't share heart-ache
She is a lonely woman,
No-one to cry to at all

Once she wore a smile of glad-ness
Now on that smile there are tear-drops
They that knew her didn't care
Wouldn't wear tear-drops
They left the lone-ly woman
To wander al-lone through the darkness

Once she loved a man
Don't bother to imagine how she loved him
You'd never guess at all
She never told the secret of her sorrow
And yet there was someone who knew.

He had eyes that saw her sorrow
He heard the sound of her sadness
When he called her no-one came
But the same sadness
He calls the lone-ly woman
But never again will she hear him.

The rest is layer upon layer of similar excellence. Somewhere Over The Rainbow is the other ‘standard’ on the album and its take of tinkling piano, flute and Sharrock’s interpretive near-spoken delivery creates a unique storytelling version. For the 'out there' of performance vocal, listen to the sparkling Oh!