Keepers of dreams
Plenty of big songs, great lyrics spawned from poetry, interesting arrangements, intimacy and strength in the delivery and so much more from Belgium based South African singer Tutu Puoane. Message music for humanity.
As impactful as Gregory Porter’s Water
Stop you dead in your tracks song ‘Together’ especially gives me the same kind of frisson and rare feeling that compares with hearing Gregory Porter’s mind blowing album Water for the first time back in 2010 and even more so that selfsame sensation is found on the very moving ‘From the Outside In’ where Ewout Pierreux’s accompaniment is an active ingredient in the drama of the song.
Wise and affecting
‘Latitude’ with its pedal steel touches from Tim Finoulst and superb trumpet from Bert Joris is also beautiful. The Lebogang Mashile lyrics from In A Ribbon Of Rhythm are extraordinarily wise and affecting. In Puoane they have found their perfect vessel framed sensitively by producer Larry Klein. Other highlights include Larry Goldings’ organ contributions on ‘Illicit Love’ a song expressing very difficult issues that find an antidote in the hope of embryonic promise even in the face of danger. Emerging from time spent with this marvellous album might make you see the world better and that bit differently.
Stripped back
Isn’t that what we all look to art, in whatever form, for – after all? Truly finding it is the difficult bit. But the search is over for now. Because that once in a blue moon sense of newness, frankness, even more rigorous matrices of truth and a coming together of so many elements in a meeting of minds are all here as we move into the realms of the mystic no matter how much as here the songs have their feet planted solidly on planet earth. The singer just as she pleas for herself in ‘Latitude’ gives us a new set of eyes to help me see and on ‘Together’ weaves them so tenderly ”into life’s seams.”
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