Album Review: Rebecca Martin | She by Seth Rogovoy (Chronogram)

 

Rebecca Martin She

(Sunnyside Records)

The headline of a New York Times review of a 2011 Rebecca Martin club gig reads: “Spare Vocals Illuminate Emotions Underneath.” That’s still an apt-and-accurate description of Martin’s aesthetic, especially as it’s heard on She, the first full album of original songs she’s released in a dozen years. Martin’s purity of approach is remarkably intimate and vulnerable. These folk- and jazz-influenced art songs are arranged for solo voice and acoustic guitar. Sometimes Martin’s vocals are multitracked, allowing her to harmonize with herself. The sum effect forefronts Martin’s sophisticated melodicism and her ethereal vocals, almost dissolving any questions about genre.

The fifty-something Maine native has worked as a chef, an MTV production manager, and a land preservationist. Now based in Kingston, Martin recorded the bulk of the album in Portugal, with additional recording handled by Scott Petito in Catskill. Martin’s songs are often populated by balancing acts. People literally fall in several of her tunes. About one character, she says, “I guess one foot on the ground will simply have to do.” Unspoken or vague allusions to darkness, trouble, brokenness, of the physical and emotional kind, are often subtly implied. In the kickoff track, “Play for Me,” Martin sings, “Music is for anyone who’s open to hear / There’s nothing between us but notes in the air.” The beauty of She is found in that air.  – Seth Rogovoy

Rebecca Martin Makes Her Solo Stand – Jazz Times

The singer-songwriter, with just voice and guitar, presents a new and revelatory song cycle.

“Following the thread” is the phrase singer-songwriter Rebecca Martin uses to characterize her free-minded approach to composition. And it’s the method by which she developed the 13 songs on SHE (Sunnyside), her first solo album. Accompanied by her own guitar, Martin unfurls a cycle of tunes marked by a bracing, bittersweet intimacy, offering profound insights into loneliness, inchoate desire and hard-won perseverance.

“It didn’t occur to me earlier on to do a solo recording,” says Martin, who first emerged in the mid-1990s as the musical partner, with Jesse Harris, in the indie pop-jazz band Once Blue. Later collaborations with Guillermo Klein and Paul Motian had a major impact on Martin’s songwriting and informed SHE as well.”

Read more at Jazz Times

After Midnight review in Stereophile Magazine

“Rebecca Martin is a singer/songwriter with a small but devoted following. After Midnight is a unique project for her, a collaboration with a well-established orchestra from Portugal. Martin’s husband, bassist Larry Grenadier, is a featured soloist.

Martin is a rarity among jazz singers: a true composer. But her songs are performed infrequently by others, perhaps because they are so specific to her. They are real-time dispatches from the front lines of life in the 21st century. They document the circumstances of her soul. They deal with common subjects like love, with uncommon insights into love’s ongoing paradoxes (“In the Nick of Time”). Often she writes about the fragile dynamics of the creative process itself (“Don’t Mean a Thing at All,” “All Day Long She Wrote”). Her language never concedes the obvious.

The orchestra is a continuous source of beauty on this album. It surrounds Martin with an envelope of complementary impressionism. Its lush textures and rich colors deepen the rapt atmosphere that is Martin’s natural habitat. 

Martin’s vocal instrument is very fine, but sometimes what a singer can do with her voice is less important than who she is. Martin sings from the heart with plain-spoken humanity. When she takes on well-worn standards like “Willow Weep for Me,” she gives witness, without self-pity, to heartbreak.  “Lush Life” is perfect for her. It is a song as stream of consciousness.  Martin thinks it aloud, like a diary entry…”

– Thomas Conrad, July 2022, Stereophile Magazine

After Midnight Review in All About Jazz

Rebecca Martin with the Orquestra Jazz de Matosinhos in Portugal and Spain

 

 

Rebecca Martin’s week as the guest artist with the Orquestra Jazz de Matosinhos in Portugal and Spain was a success with great reviews and the possibility of a recording and additional future concert dates.

 

Casa de Musica’s Video Interview of Rebecca Martin and Pedro Guedes

READ:  “Rebecca Martin: A Singer Who Sounds at Home”

 

 

TILLERY (Rebecca Martin, Gretchen Parlato, Becca Stevens) Available on Bandcamp Exclusively.

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Now you can purchase the Tillery recording, a collaborative project by Rebecca Martin, Gretchen Parlato and Becca Stevens on Band Camp.

PURCHASE ON BAND CAMP

4 1/2 Stars in Downbeat Magazine (October, 2016)

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“A Jazz Singer Fights Niagara Bottling” in The New Yorker.

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“Our group’s initial objection was that an enormous amount of the city of Kingston’s public water supply—1.75 million gallons per day—was to be sold to a bottling company to bottle and to sell without enough evidence that our water source could maintain that amount over the long haul,” she explained. “We were also disturbed that a multimillion-dollar corporation was allowed to purchase our water at a fraction of what local residents and businesses pay.” Generations of families in the area had invested in the local water infrastructure for a century, but, without warning, a water board could decide what would happen to a public resource without consulting the community. Martin and her fellow-activists began organizing public meetings to make residents aware of what was happening, and they went to meetings of the Kingston Common Council and Kingston Water Board to interrogate members on their decision-making. “That’s what we were managing—from my bedroom,” Martin said, laughing.

READ Full Article in The New Yorker

TWAIN is chosen best of 2013 in Jazz on iTunes.

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TWAIN is selected as one of the 10 best Jazz albums of 2013 by the editors of iTunes!

iTunes best of 2013

TWAIN #1 in Jazz in France. Martin Featured on Art of the Song Nationwide on Public Radio. West Coast Performance in August.

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Rebecca Martin’s latest recording TWAIN, a collaboration with longtime partner bassist Larry Grenadier and produced by Pete Rende was catapulted to the #1 spot in Jazz in France on iTunes and Amazon.  Revered music critic MICHEL CONTAT who writes for Telerama France, one of the largest publications in the country, gives the album four stars:

“TWAIN: The miraculous alchemy between a singer and bass player”
Rebecca Martin and Larry Grenadier are a couple who play together and separately, as he is also known for his key role as bassist in the famous Brad Mehldau Trio. We were introduced to them together through their enchanting disc When I Was Long Ago” (2010 Sunnyside), where the famous singer totally reinterpreted standards with a spell singing verses rarely included in the reference versions. This time, the deputy is a pianist and a drummer, and the very discreet duo assert a familiar song (“Sophisticated Lady”) with others that are all original that sound old and with a unique intimate beauty. We cannot overstate the importance of sincerity, as with Rebecca Martin, it is built entirely in art. Her voice is that of the love and confidence of maternal comfort. How the bass lines support is love itself. Such a disk is something miraculous in the avalanche of vocal jazz. – Michel Contat

Earlier this year, NATE CHINEN of the New York Times featured Martin in a full page Arts & Leisure piece titled “A Voice That Leaps Between Genres” proclaiming her work as an inspiration to a generation of jazz singers. Read more

Rebecca Martin and TWAIN Featured in New York Times. Martin a ‘touchstone’ to a generation of jazz singers for singing and songwriting.

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KINGSTON, N.Y. —  A New York Times Sunday Arts & Leisure piece written by Nate Chinen was published this weekend on Rebecca Martin and her upcoming release TWAIN on Sunnyside Records (available nationwide on Tuesday, March 26th).  “Ms. Martin is a vocalist with an earnest and unaffected style and a songwriter of unforced insight; Mr. Grenadier, her husband, is in the top tier of jazz bassists. Together they made Ms. Martin’s new album, “Twain,” due out on Sunnyside on Tuesday, in cloistered intimacy, recording a dozen of her songs with no initial accompaniment other than upright bass (his) and fingerpicked acoustic guitar (hers).” Read more