(Jazz Blues | Vocal Jazz) Pyeng Threadgill - Sweet Home: The Music of Robert Johnson - 2004, MP3, 320 kbps

Pyeng Threadgill's musical roots run deep. Daughter of jazz composer Henry Threadgill and choreographer Christina Jones, Pyeng received her BA in music from the prestigious Oberlin College and was awarded the Mellon fellowship to study music in Brazil. Pyeng continued her education at the Institute for Audio Research and is currently working on certification in the Alexander Technique, a teaching method designed to help change habitual tension patterns and increase movement awareness.
Threadgill received widespread critical acclaim for her 2004 debut album, “Sweet Home: The Songs of Robert Johnson.” On the heels of this impressive introduction, her sophomore effort “Of The Air,” faces up to a tall order. “SweetHome” was named one of the best debut albums of 2004 by the San Diego Union Tribune and C. Michael Bailey in his review for All About Jazz said, “this very well may be the best recording of 2004 to come my way.”
Pyeng, however, is confident that her penchant for simultaneously reaching forward and back will once again achieve her goal to incorporate music of the past with contemporary music: African American traditional standards, spirituals, the avant-garde and her own modern alternative experience in punk, R&B and soul.
Ultimately, Pyeng's sound defies categorization. Her voice, perhaps best described as “a cross between Jill Scott and Cassandra Wilson by way of Nina Simone” (San Diego Union Tribune, 2004) coincidentally invokes her wish to tie together the old with the new. At times, listening feels like a Billie Holiday record, and the next moment you are transported into a smoky New York City hipster joint. Says Threadgill: “The famous Jazz singers that we listen to...Ella Fitzgerald, Nancy Wilson, Dinah Washington, Sarah Vaughn, etc. were singing the Pop music of their day. There is something inspiring about that to me.
So I study and perform that repertoire while creating for all generations using the influences of my favorite singers and songwriters from Stevie Wonder to Bjork to Bob Marley”.
“Of The Air,” (the meaning of 'Pyeng', as assigned by her mother) delivers the same risk-taking, soulful, transcendent qualities of “Sweet Home”. This album promises to satisfy the already converted and win over the rest. Add to this a surprise appearance from esteemed Jazz pianist/composer Myra Melford and the result is once again a daring collage of musical exploration. The entire album was recorded analog, in keeping with Pyeng's interest in maintaining a vintage approach to new material.
An artist with a point of view and the chops to bring it life, Pyeng Threadgill is a name that's hard to forget and an artist who produces music for the ages.

Singer and arranger Pyeng Threadgill is the daughter of composer, bandleader, and multi-instrumentalist Henry Threadgill and choreographer/dancer Christina Jones, a founding member of the celebrated Urban Bushwomen. Sweet Home offers 11 Robert Johnson tunes in 11 different settings. While more cynical punters and blues purists (ugh) may sigh or wring their hands at such a notion, everyone else can take delight in Threadgill's considerable accomplishment. Unlike mere revivalists like Eric Clapton or Peter Green, Threadgill hears and interprets Johnson's blues as music not of, but for the ages.
Certainly she has models here, most notably Cassandra Wilson and Olu Dara, but Threadgill's take on these tunes doesn't attempt to remake them in her image, so much their own. Sweet Home's selections are radical. They take Johnson's songs and strips them of the interpetive, anachronistic baggage that has all but killed the spooky and hedonistic majesty of the originals at the hands of well-meaning but woefully rigid performers.
First there's the edgy, swinging jazz read of "Love in Vain," followed by the lean, ragged funk of "Phonograph Blues." The swampy acoustic guitar-and-brass blues of "Milk Cow Calf's Blues" is a nod to earlier times, but feels more like it's being performed in busker style on the lawn of Thompkins Square Park. The lone cello accompaniment (played elegantly by Dana Leong) on "If You've Got a Good Friend" evokes the dignified spirit, if not the timbre, of Nina Simone's ghost, and the jazzed-out, near scatted take on "Dust My Broom," where Threadgill is accompanied only by a double bass and a trap kit, offers the startling--and sometimes hair-raisin-- originality of her approach. Likewise the tension between second-line New Orleans rhythms at the heart of "Sweet Home Chicago," where jagged jazz-rock guitar fills are held expertly in the tense grain of Threadgill's voice is jarring, perhaps, but far from unwelcome. She croons, swoons, shouts, growls, whoops, and moans to get these blues across proving in the process that in the current era, these tunes that are enduring to be sure, but they continue to hold a cryptic mystique; they are still alluring because they can be articulated in so many different contexts and retain their seductive power and jagged grace. Threadgill's recorded debut is an auspicious one. She paints her blues shiny black and pushes them headlong into a future where tradition and history are processes of evolution, not quaint curiosities.
by Thom Jurek