playlist
San José Suite Etienne Charles (Culture Shock Music)
Lifted by Love Samantha Gooden
Jazz in the wider Americas is more than improvisation that engages the blues and swing, but an evolving exploration of sounds, rhythms, and cultural tendencies informing the music that is the definition of freedom. San José Suite, Etienne Charles’s sixth album, is a mature contemplation of this Trinidadian trumpeter’s wider encounters with the elements of creole music in the New World. Drawing inspiration from three San José cities in the Americas — in Costa Rica, California, and Trinidad — Charles re-tells the stories and histories of those communities, their people and their commonalities, with jazz that is both rhythmically diverse and harmonically expressive enough to never be clichéd. “Cahuita”, “Boruca”, “Revolt”, and “Speed City” are musical statements of keen observation, celebratory reflection, and musical adroitness. This album is also a signal to the listener that jazz in the twenty-first century is in the hands of a burgeoning trumpet pioneer charting modern directions much like Armstrong, Davis, and Marsalis before him.
Praise and worship songs with lyrics that focus on Christian faith, and music that follows modern popular genre trends (pop, R&B, and reggae, in this case), are the focus of contemporary Caribbean gospel music. Samantha Gooden — born in the UK, raised in Jamaica, now living in Barbados — is in a phase of her life where she recognises that her voice is a gift from God, and she wants to freely share that gift with the world, “to reach out.” As such, on her debut five-song EP Lifted By Love, precursor to a full-length album to be released later this year, Gooden relates personal truths and shares testimonies that inspire, that exalt, that spur reflection from a listener willing to listen. She sings: “I am a child of the King / I am a child of the One who made everything,” in a voice that glorifies and honours her faith. Celebrating with her is easy to do.
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