Music Review: Brigitte Zarie - 'L'amour'

By Christopher Zoukis, BLOGCRITICS.ORG
Published 10:00 pm, Friday, January 17, 2014
Jazz music is funny in that good jazz has the quality of being inscrutable. In other words, good jazz is music that grabs you somewhere in your head or your heart or your viscera. And you really, really like it. It moves you. But no matter how hard you try, you can't explain why you like it so much. It's inscrutable. There's a certain arcane energy to it. And bad jazz, well, it strains all tolerance. Bad jazz makes you grind your teeth; it's nothing more than style over substance, a veneer of pleasing countenance over rough bumps and gouges. And of course, bad jazz generates bad jazz singers, so much so that they not only abound, like fungus growing on wheat, but sound as if they just dropped in from the Oligocene epoch of geological Deep Time; rumbly, quaking voices, the offshoot of ensuing concatenations of cause and effect, chanting impenetrable dirges.

Fortunately, a few good jazz singers still exist, most of whom are female. Exactly why jazz subsidizes women over men is open to debate. My theory is this: female voices contain some nuance inside them that lends conviction to melancholy. Norah Jones comes to mind, as does Diana Krall. Her voice can get redundant, as can her grandiose, glitzy productions. Too much Krall makes me think of exhausted gorillas, every one of them tired of imitating human noises.
Read more: http://www.seattlepi.com/lifestyle/blogcritics/article/Music-Review-Brigitte-Zarie-L-amour-5156037.php