Moonbeam Parade (Ugly Cat Music) is singer/songwriter/producer/multi-instrumentalist Giulia Millanta's fifth and best CD. Born and raised in Italy, she's made Texas her home since 2012. She wrote or co-wrote all 13 songs and has the cream of the studio crop-from the bands of Bob Dylan, Dixie Chicks, Willie Nelson, Robert Palmer and Patty Griffin-to help her execute her profound lyrics, sung in a kind of bird-with a-broken-wing appeal. You just want to take her home and care for her.
Recorded live with very few overdubs, she plays electric guitar for the first time on CD, leaving her trusty ukulele home. She sings in four languages and this reporter has previously written of her as being "deeply evocative with a dash of Piaf, a sprinkle of Lady Day, a pinch of Norah Jones and a teaspoon of Madeleine Peyroux."
On "There's a Bridge," she writes, "...it's still there between your life and all the things you never dare..." "Silvery Gown" could be construed as its answer song as it's a metaphor for getting those things you so desperately want. "Eve's Song" stands up for her gender going all the way back to the first two humans on Earth. "4th & Vodka" is about faults we all share.
Those in the Austin area might even be able to dine with this superstar-in-waiting as she's created something called "Dinner With Giulia" where she'll come to your house and cook an Italian dinner for your family before serenading you in song.
The Soul of Ivo Perelman is different than most. A visual artist whose drawings and paintings draw the big bucks at art galleries around the world, Ivo also inhabits his tenor sax as an extension of his own breath. When this transplanted Brazilian (now making his home in New York City) enters the recording studio, it's with no songs, no charts, no arrangements, no clear idea of what will spontaneously erupt from not only his sax, but--in this case--from the bass of Michael Bisio, the drums of Walt Dickey and the piano of Matthew Shipp. Extemporarily composed freedom could be laden with pitfalls if not with the right musicians. The nine tracks in a compact 56:15 circle and swoop low before flying up and out of the stratosphere. It's all very "Metaphysical," as the opener attests, before the listener is "Crossing" into "Fragments" on a "Landscape" of pure "Joy," despite it being deep within "The Unknown." Taken as the second part of a previous piano/sax duet CD released on the same day called Corpo, Ivo is fond of releasing multiple projects simultaneously. To that end, three other CDs-Blue, The Hitchhiker and Breaking Point-were also released that day earlier this year (May 20). I think it's fair to say there's no other jazz man working today in the same realm. On Soul, he's John Coltrane crossed with such 12-tone avant-garde composers as Arnold Schoenberg [1874-1951], Alban Berg [1885-1935] and Anton Webern [1883-1945].
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