Thanks to Fay Victor I've got a copy of her great, impressive Darker Than Blue album and her new one Lazy Old Sun too.
Recorded on September 5, 2003, at IM-huis, Amsterdam and September 20, 2003, at SJU-huis, Utrecht, The Netherlands, this is not your typical live album. Usually you get some kind of best-of with a live album plus one or two new tracks. Here you get new original compostions by Fay Victor and Jochem van Dijk plus some obscure cover versions.
Listening to this album it's obvious, that Fay has evolved and matured as an artist although I must admit that this meant for me that I had to listen to this album over and over again to get into it. Whereas the predecessor Darker Than Blue was sophisticated and in some way easy to understand, Lazy Old Sun is certainly a record that needs more attention and time but will take you to the next level as a listener of jazz music. Thanks to the live setting this record offers more room to improvisation and free jazz elements than Fay's studio albums.
But once you take your time and get involved in this record, you'll discover it's beauty and the creativity and talent of Fay and her musicians.
"Before I recently returned to NYC, I was living in Amsterdam, the Netherlands (colloquially known as the Low Lands) for the last 8 years.", says Fay, "To conclude an important period in my life, I recorded this live-album with the band I had been working with for the last 2 years. I picked most of the repertoire on the basis that it reflects the peculiarities of life in Holland, from the point of view of a transitory settler like me."
The title track, Lazy Old Sun, is a cover of a song by The Kinks and - like on her previous album Darker Than Blue and it's opening track - this is just Fay singing with one instrument accompanying her. This time it's Anton Goudsmit on guitar and the result is a haunting version that clearly shows Fay's ability to adopt a song and make it her own.
She achives the same with People Are Strange, originally recorded by The Doors. Fay just lets you forget that there has been other versions of this song before.
Again Fay adds her lyric to other people's song like on 3rd Stone From The Sun by Jimi Hendrix, a song that finds Fay using her voice as additional instrument with some fine scatting. Sonny Rollins' Way Out West gets the Fay treatment too and is renamed Heading West (Way Out) and captures Fay's situation leaving the Netherlands to return to the USA.
Magere Brug is a song named after a bridge in Amsterdam and, quite frankly, a song I have my difficulties with to get into. It starts quite interesting with a trombone sounding like wind but then becomes a little bit too "artistic" for my personal taste.
Nico is another song that digests Fay's stay in the Netherlands and is sung in Dutch. It tells the story of a man firmly rooted in his homeground of agricultural Holland, and definitely out of step with modern times. The result is an interesting piece of modern improvised jazz but like Magere Brug it lacks that special something in the melody department for my personal taste.
But there are enough other songs here to please people like me. Take the original compositions There They Are or Stealaway, the latter being a great piece of slow blues inspired jazz.
Or listen to Laura, a captivating downtempo tune, that starts with a fine trombone by Wolter Wierbos and Jacko Schoonderwoerd on bass until Fay comes in with her magic vocals.
Add to this three more covers (Jackie McLean's Saturday And Sunday, Randy Newman's Last Night I Had A Dream and a funky version of Curtis Mayfield's Check Out Your Mind) and you have a impressive piece of musical art for the advanced listener.