Portrait Landscape
New album entitled Portrait Landscape, performed by my group, the Genius Loci Ensemble. If you visit the album on Bandcamp you can read notes on the individual tracks and order a very, very limited edition hard copy compact disc.
The title is a play on words, as I enjoy songs that capture the energy of place and or the energy of people. As well as a nod to the fact that my biggest fans are visual artists so this is music for them.
The question that propels me forward is this: what to sing? I did learn hundreds of love songs as a straight ahead jazz singer when I was a kid but even then I preferred inventing music with four tracks of vocals that started in my own automatic writing or beatnik run-on poems, mimicking perhaps the ancient poetic traditions of my Javanese ancestors.
What I love to do now is to compose new methods of extracting stories, energy and melody. I invent different rules for creation and build structures for creative expression. For example, for this album, we are using ancestral astrology on the one hand (portrait), or capturing the spirit of place on the other (landscape). The cinematic, lyrical results could be subtitled: music for visual artists.
In my study of the wild and captivating vocal tradition of pansori from Korea I also considered stories we don’t tend to tell in jazz songs, intricate layers of inter-generational family relationships and the shifting moods within them. Over many years I diligently produced a poetic portrait on the birthdays of my close family members. These poems are the starting points here on several tracks including Nineteen from my youngest son’s nineteenth birthday and Seventeen from the eldest’s seventeenth. The angst of those ages is expressed along with my own helplessness as their mother in the face of it all. Older now, and also accomplished and prolific in freestyle poetry themselves, they have contributed their own songs on the tracks Story of Namsan and Disease. Inventing songs with the rhythm section of Reg and Michel is something they began doing since early childhood so we continue the family tradition.
So here are the vignettes, stories from magical places in South Korea, or a beach in Guadeloupe, or a pristine mountain lake in Quebec, the wild energy of children intertwined with the lives of their parents in these places, of mothering and being a child or a grandchild shunned. It’s a kaleidoscope of imagery and melody, with sparse rhythm and guitar morphed and transformed, with all the drama of an ancestral story, and with jazz and improvisation, instant composing, at its core.
Review from Alain Fleche at La Gazette Bleue: “Bonheur de retrouver cette voix qui côtoie les Sphères Célestes et s’enracine voluptueusement dans une matière en perpétuel devenir, cette émotion qui nous trouble de la pointe des cheveux au bout des orteils, de la surface de la peau au centre du coeur là où l’âme affleure, ces mots qui coule comme d’une fontaine intarissable et enchantée, ces mélodies comme les chants que s’inventent les enfants, en éternel suspend, pas toujours immédiatement accessibles mais toujours faisant sens.“
see: lagazettebleuedactionjazz.fr/jeannette-lambert-6“
Review from Yoshi Maclear Wall at The WholeNote: “Lambert is a painter with words, every quiver of her voice, and these incredible suites of endlessly rewarding concepts and dazzling stylistic convergences, illustrate this. “
We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec for some of the research and development stage of this project.