China Moses - Nightintales, album review

Dee Dee's Daughter Delights

How apt on the 1^st April, in the month when Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote his poem ‘The Nightingale’

… 'Tis the merry Nightingale
That crowds and hurries, and precipitates
With fast thick warble his delicious notes,
As he were fearful that an April night
Would be too short for him to utter forth
His love-chant, and disburthen his full soul
Of all its music!

that I can review this album by China Moses with its own delicious notes and full soul of all its music. [OK - it is a misreading of the actual title, but that's the license, and it's also prevalent on the net!]

Indeed, it is the merging of jazz and soul that informs this collection of songs, opener Running a bass-throbbed riff of a jazzfunk song, and next Put It On the Line a sultry old-school nighttime walk of a song, organ puffs and a sweet soul chorus just audible in the background before the sax and shouts burst in.

Third Disconnected is mostly funk, and Moses’ vocal continues with its sass, the staccato accompaniments – instrumental and vocal – add to the pert beats. In fourth Ticking Boxes we have in this balladic surround the foreground deep swell of Moses singing with equally deep emotion. The following Whatever keeps the pace slow and brooding. Then it is Watch Out and the abrupt pump of bass again.

There’s orchestral lounge jazz on eighth Lobby Call with the trumpet accompaniment from Takuya Kuroda, and on tenth Blame Jerry, Craig David producer Anthony Marshall and trumpeter Theo Croker join in a Moses self-penned but old-standard-sounding contribution to the fulsome range on this fine album.