Search - Bett Butler :: Myths & Fables

Like category-defying artists Joni Mitchell, Cassandra Wilson, and Abbey Lincoln, songwriter Bett Butler refuses confinement to formula. Drawing from progressive jazz, earthy blues, Brazilian music, and traditions of chamber music and art songs, she follows an offbeat assortment of characters in this unorthodox collection of stories: an artist who dreams of flying beyond the stifling domesticity demanded by her lover, small-town residents still reeling from a generations-old suicide, a saucy broad demanding equal satisfaction in the bedroom, an angel in a dog suit. But her aversion to the predictable doesn t stop there. The dark political fable ''Grim Fairy Tale'' bounces along as a happy samba. A soaring solo by Finnish fusion guitarist Jartse Tuonimen turns the tragic folk song ''Secrets'' into a rousing rock anthem. And ''Nothin' to Be Proud Of,'' a clarion call to conscience, is delivered with gentle, childlike innocence. Producer/bassist/composer Joel Dilley uses instrumentation, placement, and effects cinematically, creating the perfect aural mise en scène for each story, transporting the listener to the alcohol-numbed claustrophobia of ''When Love Has Left the Room'' (first place winner in the jazz category of the prestigious International Songwriting Competition), or a lonely plaza where distant voices echo in his own composition ''Recuerdos.'' He and former Gatemouth Brown drummer Lloyd Herrman anchor this collection with solid grooves ranging from gutbucket to sensitive brushwork, punctuated by the world-music percussion of Mwendo drummer tbow Gonzales and the occasional gypsy voice of Dilley's cello-like arco lines. In the straight-ahead treatment of Rodgers and Hart's ''I Wish I Were in Love Again,'' co-producer/trumpet player Cecil Carter shares horn duties on his own edgy arrangements with alto saxophonist Richard Oppenheim, and Polly Harrison's guitar on the bossa nova ''Bitter Dawn'' reverberates with Getz/Gilberto-era authenticity. On slide guitar, Gib Wharton brings the same eerie noir quality that he contributed to the title cut of Cassandra Wilson's Blue Light 'til Dawn, rounding out the list, as author Roberto Bonazzi says in the liner notes, of ''first-call musicians who contribute to both the overall artistic value and entertaining sounds of Butler's extremely sophisticated Myths & Fables.''