Alice Zawadzki - Within You Is a World of Spring review | John Lewis's contemporary album of the month

The Guardian 80

(Whirlwind Records)
The Anglo-Polish vocalist goes way beyond jazz on her second solo album, for a hymn to nature that masters all manner of styles

Alice Zawadzki is an Anglo-Polish vocalist, violinist, pianist and composer who studied composition and has since worked across a vast array of styles – film soundtracks, music theatre and assorted varieties of European folk music. She’s probably best known for her collaborations with assorted British jazz musicians – including a 2016 album of duets with pianist Dan Whieldon – but her second solo album is an excursion way beyond jazz into a kind of ECM-ish art song, with each track so different from the last that it sounds like a compilation. The album’s closer, O Mio Amore, recalls like a Schubert lied; Keeper sounds like a Stevie Wonder ballad (complete with Zawadzki multi-tracking her own gospel choir); on Es Verdad (It Is True) she sings in Spanish while playing Celtic reels on the fiddle. What unites this disparate collection is that Zawadzki serves, throughout, as the awestruck narrator of an extended hymn to nature. In The Woods, her magical realist poetry is accompanied by the haunting sound of a Korean taegŭm flute, while the title track is a lengthy meditation on the joys of spring (“that soulful chaotic season”), where her angular string phrases shine through the dense arrangements like patches of sunlight in a forest.