Gaea Schell’s Engaging Eclecticism

Gaea Schell on the cover of her latest album (courtesy of Kate Smith Promotions)

Towards the end of this past June, Saphu Records released the third album featuring Gaea Schell, entitled In Your Own Sweet Way. There is considerable breadth across the eleven tracks; but this is probably to be expected of a woman who is not only a multi-instrumentalist (piano and flute) but also a composer, an arranger, and a vocalist. This would make her a “Jill of all trades;” but, in contrast to that cliché, she has a masterful command of everything that she undertakes. As will be seen from the above hyperlink, the album is currently available from Amazon.com only through MP3 tracks.

The advance press release divides that “considerable breadth” into three categories.  Two of the tracks feature Schell’s vocal work. Five are original compositions in the Latin genre. The remaining four tracks are straight-ahead jazz in a variety of different settings. The genres are interleaved in a manner that allows the attentive listener to appreciate the diversity of Schell’s approaches to performance.

I have to confess, however, that one significant factor that drew me to this album was the presence of John Wiitala on bass. Unless I am mistaken, I have been aware of Wiitala at least as far back as when he was providing bass for The Mike Greensill Trio, whose leader has been giving Labor Day performances for Old First Concerts for as long as I can remember. (The first time I wrote about Wiitala was when he contributed to the 2010 Labor Day gig.) The fact is that, as a Music Theory student, I have always been aware of the fact that, whatever the “tune” may be, the presentation of that tune always rests on the foundation of the bass line; and Wiitala has a gift for not only laying that foundation but also devising just the right techniques for embellishing it.

At the other end of the “frequency spectrum,” I find myself just as impressed with Schell’s flute work. The fact is, though, that Schell always takes the “tune” as the point of departure, regardless is whether it is introduced on the flute, the piano, or the vocal line. Once that point of departure has been established, she has any number of avenues along which she can explore embellishment; and she seems to have an almost natural gift for going down just the right thoroughfare at just the right time. Nevertheless, to give credit where credit is due, the way in which her flute embellishments weave their way around the trumpet line played by Marco Diaz is so elaborate that even the most serious followers of the polyphony of Johann Sebastian Bach are likely to sit up and take notice!

This is definitely an album that does justice to Duke Ellington’s conviction that “It’s all music!”