Search - Jay Clayton :: Brooklyn 2000

Wailing to the Converted

Samuel Chell | 07/20/2002

(2 out of 5 stars)

"It would be nice to admire Jay Clayton for being a risktaker. In a sea of caution-erring female jazzers who set their sights on little more than crooning and cooing in ready-made prescriptive role-playing, Clayton stands out. Her adventurous choices make her the opposite of someone such as Jane Monheit. Clayton, nevertheless, takes self-indulgence to such extremes that you wish she'd knock it off. She doesn't shape notes so much as she pulverizes them, and all too frequently she sings flat in arrangements antethetical to the songwriters' intent. Clayton loves to sing "out" as she will tell anyone willing to listen, yet it's the "out" numbers that are numblingly awful. Her "Lament for Coltrane" doesn't have a honest bone it its exhumed body; the piece fails to convince. Likewise, the attempts to combine ragas with ee cummings poems come across as overwrought, overbearing, boorish. Clayton is at her best when she bags the gimmicks and downtown posturing and just plays it straight. She has two duets with the glorious George Cables playing piano that make Brooklyn 2000 worth a listen. Cables and Clayton take a poignant turn on the standard "Young and Foolish" (including the verse, rarely heard) that is simply heartbreaking. When she sings "one day we fell in love/now we wonder what we were dreaming of...smiling in the sunlight, laughing in the rain/I wish that we were young and foolish again" in a clear, unforced delivery, it's worth suffering the multitude of aesthetic sins she commits elsewhere."

Peerless Player

Samuel Chell | Kenosha,, WI United States | 04/06/2004

(5 out of 5 stars)

"In the interest of balancing a previous review, I must point out that the music on this album is anything but posturing, pulverizing, and pretense. Of all singers currently on the scene, Jay is one of the least contrived or programmed and the most open and honest. At its most basic level, this music is a game, and its greatest practitioners, such as Dizzy Gillespie, are above all master "players," willing to take risks and entertain serendipitous surprises. I have yet to hear a Jay Clayton album that is not as much about the other players and the sport of music-making itself as it is about her. "Brooklyn 2000" is no exception.All of the performances on this album delight and communicate--even the so-called "experimental" ones--because of Jay's example and influence. She approaches the two Cummings' lyrics and the Cables' waltz with the curiosity and openness of a child--not with pretentious "hipness" or artistic self-consciousness. But like Blake's or Wordsworth's "wise" child, she's also a reassuring enabler, a performer who continually reminds us of the joy of making and sharing music.And she demonstrates once again that she has an unerring ear for great songs along with a knowing savvy about making them work. McCoy Tyner's and Sammy Cahn's "You Taught My Heart to Sing" is a lovely tune but so full of starts and stops, premature tonics disruptive of continuity, that I had not heard it done justice until Jay's performance here. She resists overblown emotional rhetoric, connects the right phrases, and makes it seem, well, like child's play. That's what the best jazz, if not all creative art, is about--and Jay is one of the few surviving singers who can take us there."