Meow Baby •••
Danny Lerman,
Jazz-funk saxophonist Danny Lerman is fine form on his rhythms and grooves with songs that deploy inescapable melodies. For his second album, Mr. Lerman co-wrote a dozen songs, recorded two covers (“No Ordinary Love,” and “Imagine”) and reissued a track (“You Take My Breath Away”) from his debut album, Danny’s Island.  While his music is rooted in contemporary jazz with R&B grooves and pop melodies, Mr. Lerman has dabbled with Latin, South African, Middle Eastern and World Music sensibilities on Meow Baby. Drummer Tal Bergman (Rod Stewart, Billy Idol, Loreena McKennitt, Herb Alpert, Chaka Khan), who worked on Mr. Lerman’s first album, not only provides exciting and exotic beats for Meow Baby, but he produced ten tracks.  A few cuts were produced by seminal urban jazz artist Norman Connors and Randy Brecker, Hubert Laws, Howard Hewett, Paul Jackson Jr., Bobby Lyle, and Munyungo Jackson made appearances on the album. Mr. Lerman is a seasoned performer who has shared concert stages with Herbie Hancock, Sergio Mendes, Richard Elliot, David Benoit and Eric Marienthal.

World Music
Taqasim •••
Marcel Khalifé, Connecting Cultures Records 
This is world renowned Lebanese musician Marcel Khalifé’s latest release — a tribute and an expression of fidelity from Mr. Khalifé to the poet Mahmoud Darwish. According to Mr. Khalife from the liner notes, “Taqasim is the fruit of a journey towards an apparition like a flower on a precipice to which I had reached out with my hand for some time, but had not dared to touch. With this work, I have overcome my timidity, giving way to a newfound daring  as I dedicate it to Mahmoud, my friend and brother who had found his own daring long before I did. In Taqasim, I will try to reproduce, only as music can, the esthetical, spiritual, emotional, and intellectual resonance of Darwish’s poetry. Through a purely musical idiom, I will attempt to communicate what my singing voice has never been able to communicate in any setting of Darwish’s poems. I will ‘encode’ his poetry in a system of rhythm, melody, and harmony.”    

Red Soil In My Eyes ••••
Somi, World Village/Harmonica Mundi
This is an album I reviewed last year which I think deserves everyone’s attention. On Red Soil In My Eyes, Somi has incorporated jazz, African folk and soul  to create a hybrid sound all her own that resonates in a trans-national world of music, business and culture. Somi was born of Ugandan and Rwandan parents, and raised in Africa and the US, but that’s too easy an answer for such a masterfully complex album. After listening to it straight through from beginning to end, you may feel something like awe. The album is full of graceful melodic inventiveness, with an easy, natural charm that somehow manages to be infinitely bold. And of course the winning songs come up as in some dream-world lottery.

Gifted with a powerful, four-octave voice, Ms. Somi should be considered as the new high-priestess of contemporary universal jazz. She is a natural to take her place on a continuum of great jazz vocalists that includes Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Nina Simone, Dee Dee Bridgewater, Cassandra Wilson, Dianne Reeves, and Diana Krall. Listen to “Losing You” and you’re going to fall under its spell straight away. Or “Ingele,” a song that radiates a life-enhancing spontaneity. Red Soil In My Eyes is an intensely spiritual, prayerful work in which she sings with heartfelt passion on such standouts as “Red Soil In My Eyes, “Circles,” and “Natural.” This is a stunning album, combining foundation jazz sensibilities and heart-stopping beauty in ideal equilibrium. Brilliant! For this critic, a new voice has emerged on the jazz scene in what should be a Grammy Award-winning performance.

All CDs reviewed in this article are heard through Bowers & Wilkens 802D Speakers and ASW 4000 subwoofer, and Rotel Preamp 1070, amplifier 1092 and CD player1072. For more information about this column, please email your questions to fagon@hillrag.com