Sarah McKenzie’s Brazilian-Style Stress Release

Cover of the album being discussed (from its Amazon.com Web page)

Given what has been happening over the last several weeks, I should know better than to spend too much time watching the news of television. Nevertheless, there I was having my lunch while watching the latest BBC News half-hour summary. The only way I could restore a calm stability was to recall listening to Sarah McKenzie’s latest jazz album, Without You.

McKenzie was born in Australia but is now based in Los Angeles. Without You is her latest album, which is devoted entirely to Brazilian jazz. The album consists of fourteen tracks, nine of which are her interpretations of songs by Antônio Carlos Jobim. In the spirit of call-and-response, three of the tracks are McKenzie originals. The first track on the album is “The Gentle Rain,” composed by Luiz Bonfá, best known for the music he composed for the film Black Orpheus. The remaining track, “Without You,” is by Romero Lubambo, the one Brazilian on the album to migrate to the United States. Most recently, he played guitar for the recording sessions for Without You.

The most interesting of the instrumentalists on this album, however, is Jacques Morelenbaum, who had previously played cello for Jobim’s concerts and recordings. There is both clarity and richness to the cello sonority, serving up a capacity for lyricism whose closest challenger is the human voice itself. I suspect that the cello influence may have rubbed off on Bob Sheppard, who occasionally chooses his flute over his saxophone. The other instrumentalists are percussionists Peter Erskine and Rogerio Boccato with Geoff Gascoyne on bass. McKenzie occasionally adds to the mix with piano work.

McKenzie is secure enough in her sense of pitch that she can negotiate just about any series of intervals in a melodic line, invoking her interpretation skills to sort out the embellishing notes from the ones being embellished. This allows her to seek out her own “journey of dispositions” for each of her selections. More often than not, this leads to new perspectives on Brazilian composers that many have relegated to the past.

So it is that any effort to account for the fourteen tracks on this album inevitably leads back to that rhetoric of calm stability. Clarity of diction means that every “message” sent by McKenzie mines disposition from both the thematic content and the words behind those themes. The more we focus on the mechanisms behind her technique, the better off we shall be in our efforts to slough off all of those stress-inducing situations that seem to be the requisite stock-in-trade for television news.