Zara McFarlane - Arise

The Guardian 80

(Brownswood)

The Mobo-winning London singer Zara McFarlane has sounded like a class act for longer than a star-fixated world might realise, and her recent output suggests that her intuitions unerringly guide her emotions toward appreciatively consensual recognition. Arise may be too long on genre music and short on improv for jazz hardliners, but for many it will be a fascinating perspective on an African Caribbean family lineage shared by McFarlane and her gifted drummer and producer Moses Boyd. McFarlane’s Nina Simone and Cassandra Wilson connections are audible, but she has rarely sounded more comfortable with herself and with jazz – in the casually sliding variations on Pride’s title word, around Binker Golding’s earthy tenor-sax lines, in her imploring vocal lines around the Crusaders-like funk horn vamps of Peace Begins Within, or soaring through the Congos’ pre-reggae classic Fisherman. But Silhouette, a brass-bandish dirge featuring Shabaka Hutchings’ gently penetrative bass clarinet and McFarlane’s quiet coda, is the highlight. Explicit jazz isn’t dominant, but its thinking always is.