Album reviews: Gloria Estefan | Faith Eliott | Lavinia Blackwall
Gloria Estefan returns with her first Spanish language album in almost 20 years, while Edinburgh-based singer-songwriter Faith Eliott takes an imaginative dive into science, nature and mythology, writes Fiona Shepherd
Gloria Estefan: Raices (Crescent Moon/Sony Music Latin) ★★★
Faith Eliott: Dryas (Lost Map) ★★★★★
Lavinia Blackwall: The Making (The Barne Society) ★★★★
Latin superstar Gloria Estefan marks 50 years in music with her first Spanish language album in almost two decades. Raices, meaning “roots”, is a vibrant exploration of her Cuban-American heritage, written and produced by her husband Emilio Estefan. Its title track is a joyous Cubano catharsis, with lyrics translating as “if you want a good harvest, you need to know how to sow, with faith and dedication, that tree will grow roots”.
Elsewhere, Estefan helms the big band clamour and salsa explosion of La Vecina (No Se Na) with infectious verve, delivers impassioned balladeering on Tan Iguales y Tan Diferentes, accompanied by Spanish guitar and lush orchestration, and settles into a gentler middle of the road sway on Cuando el Tiempo Nos Castiga.
Edinburgh-based singer/songwriter Faith Eliott is something special, following up debut album Impossible Bodies with another imaginative dive into science, nature and mythology. Dryas is a gorgeous, gentle, poignant and hopeful folk pop fantasia, where the elemental intersects with the digital. Eliott dives into apocalypse stories on snowglobe, weaves a sparse, gothic anthropomorphic yarn on thys creatur and presides beautifully over an ode of unrequited love from a hagfish to a giant isopod, where the needy meets the unavailable on the ocean floor.
Trembling Bells frontwoman Lavinia Blackwall is a similarly bold stylist. Her latest solo album is a full folk band fiesta in the spirit of Pentangle and Steeleye Span with her own soaring vocal as the star instrument. Maggie Reilly of Moonlight Shadow fame guests on My Hopes Are All Mine, a bitter tale of inequality, themed round the creaky turning of the wheel of fortune. Laura J Martin adds ye olde recorder part to the folk fable Scarlett Fever, while Blackwall veers into plaintive baroque pop on We All Get Lost and lets loose her inner Kate Bush on the glam eccentricity of Morning To Remember.
CLASSICAL
Yeol Eum Sol: Ravel & Bach (Naïve) ★★★★
Yet more Maurice Ravel to mark the 150th anniversary of his birth, this time from dynamic South Korean pianist Yeol Eum Son with The Hague’s Residentie Orkest under Anja Bihlmaier. Both Son and Bihlmaier have hugely impressed live audiences in Scotland of late, performing with the SCO and BBC SSO respectively. But here they are together in a Ravel piano concerto double bill – the scintillating G major and hybrid Left Hand Concerto (written for Paul Wittgenstein, who lost his right arm in the First World War) – and the teamwork is exemplary. Son brings freshly-conceived excitement to the G major, a glorious mix of zestfulness and laid-back poeticism, woozy and bluesy in the slow movement, pyrotechnically scintillating in the Finale, with Bihlmaier deploying lightning orchestral fire in response. The Left Hand Concerto is weightier, but still possesses drive and determined musicality. Son ends with four left hand solo transcriptions by Wittgenstein. Ken Walton
JAZZ
Tom Lyne with Dave Milligan: Well Mixed Blue (LisaLeo Records) ★★★★
A familiar name in Scottish jazz, double-bassist Tom Lyne steps out of the rhythm section to create this engaging duo album with longstanding collaborator and friend, pianist Dave Milligan. All 12 tracks are Lyne’s compositions except for a beefy, percussive bass treatment of the Sanborn-Miller number Run For Cover. The pair maintain admirable creative balance between improvisation and melody. Sonorous bass deliberations, for instance, open the intriguingly titled Bent Peg, before Milligan delicately eases his way in, there’s the easy-going busyness of Three Sides Now, the gleefully ranging title track and springy bass partnering darting piano in Use Me. Elsewhere, bass and piano sound in elegant concurrence in the wistful, almost hymn-like melody of Holding On, while a highlight is the wonderfully catchy Catriona’s – originally composed by Lyne for (and performed in) a Tobermory hairdresser’s as part of Milligan’s trio project, Shops. Jim Gilchrist
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