Arioli's latest is a happy gift
Susie Arioli Spring Spectra Musique stars The title may be Spring, but Susie Arioli’s new album is just in time for a happy Christmas present. What a gift.
The Toronto jazz chanteuse includes a nice mix of her own compositions and some classic tunes, singing always of both the exhilaration and the sadness of love.
For exhilaration, she starts the album with Loverboy, running that warm, full alto through some gentle swing. And Kevin Turcotte’s trumpet solo is like crystal. In fact, all the players Arioli has assembled, from pianist/ arranger/ band leader Don Thompson through the rest are the cream of the Toronto scene, what Arioli calls “these jazz lions.”
But, back to reality, why, Arioli asks, does he have to be Mean To Me? There’s some nice punning on the lyrics of this light swing number, but no puns needed in Bo Diddley’s gem Dearest Darling, with its emphasis on that Bo beat and its burning sax solo — move over yule log.
I Can’t Say No and Someone Else both have a streak of personal morality running through them that helps texture a big fun album. In the first, the singer is a girl who just can’t say no to the devil and in the second Arioli asks, when considering making a play for another woman’s man, if it’s the right thing to do and how many people may be hurt.
The title track has a wonderfully contrarian line, pretty much calling Spring idiotic and a stupid topic since the singer’s man’s not nuts about her.
Put this one under someone’s tree. Glenn Sutter Let the Dog Run Northern Town
½ stars Regina-based singer-songwriter Glenn Sutter is your typical folkie: he sings of the environment, of love and life, and of his place in this, to quote a title, Great Big World.
Oh yes, and if the musician thing doesn’t work out, he’s got a PhD in Biology and a steady job as Curator of Human Ecology at the Royal Saskatchewan Museum to tide him over between gigs.
Right from song one of his third album, Let the Dog Run, Sutter sings of knowing and understanding our place in the world, “Cos life is all about living, whatever comes down.” Ordinary Wine, another bit of a rocker, laments, at first, that he gets only the ordinary stuff, but is contented at last with that very vintage.
Sutter’s voice is somewhat weak, but his passion, his playing, and his extraordinary backup musicians and singers (a choir on Big White Bird) help paper over the places where his voice falls short. As he says in Lay Me Down, maybe we don’t have to hunt so hard for paradise, it could be right in front of us.