Ranee Lee’s latest, Lives Upstairs, is a highly enjoyable listen. You may not think so after listening to the first few cuts – while her choice of tunes is made more fun by the slightly obscure nature, the style with which the album opens can make you believe this will be a low-key, if diverse, excursion.
Hang in until cut 4.
With “A Crooked Road”, Ranee takes the never recorded Pat Methany tune, and the album as a whole, in a new direction. The band gets to stretch out, and Ms. Lee draws in the listener, slyly reversing your preconceived ideas about this set. After “A Crooked Road”, she stops short, spins a one-eighty, and rips into “Four”, based on a bop tune by Miles Davis, and you’ll catch yourself grinning.
“Gershwin Medley” only seems to come up a little short because you’re left wanting more “Four,” but when she slips into “Fire and Rain,” the James Taylor song, if you aren’t laden with goose bumps, you aren’t listening to this John Sadowy arrangement, you’re letting it play in the background without much notice.
Ms. Lee doesn’t let all the other song writers do all the talking – she takes up an original piece in “The Storm”, a standard blues, and lets pianist Sadowy and guitarist Richard Ring take some strides.
Once she finishes with “Dearly Beloved”, you’re ready to jump right back into the front of the album, with a renewed sense of what this live CD is all about, and even those first three cuts, “I Just Found Out About Love”, “In Love In Vain”, and “A Time for Love” have a new direction imprinted on your mind, and you can hear them in a new light, not to be glossed over as you originally thought.
While this is a live album, recorded at Upstairs, the venerated jazz club that happens to be in a basement in Montreal, the engineering and mix is as tight as any studio album, and if you don’t cheat and read the liner notes first (or this review), you’ll be surprised by the house intruding on your album at the end of every song. Lives Upstairs (as in Jazz Lives, not Days of our Lives) is Ms. Lee’s second live album in 30 years and 10 releases, and there is a reason this album won the 2010 Juno Vocal Jazz Album of the Year. While the exchange rate isn’t exactly in our favor, it’s well worth picking up.-----SAM POND