Lucia Cadotsch - Speak Low II review | John Fordham's jazz album of the month

The Guardian 0

(We Jazz Records)
Cadotsch’s second album continues down an unusual path, combining her spellbinding singing with wayward improv

Lucia Cadotsch’s 2016 debut Speak Low unveiled the young Swiss musician’s unusual proposition, singing the classics with spellbindingly impassive purity alongside two wayward Swedish free-improvisers. Her follow-up is even more startling, primarily for the moment where Cadotsch elides two songs written more than 30 years apart – one for swing fans on the brink of the second world war, the other born out of early 1970s psychedelia – and makes them sound inseparable and contemporary. First she casually invigorates and dismantles 1939’s What’s New? while tenor saxist Otis Sandsjö and bassist Petter Eldh run ghostly, hollow-toned dissonances and rugged bass countermelodies around her. Then, without her partners dropping a rhythmic stitch, she segues into a carefree glide over Tony Williams’s dirgily trippy 1971 song There Comes a Time.