If you read this site carefully you may remember Lizz Wright as the brilliant singer on Joe Sample's last album, The Pecan Tree, and finally Verve decided to invest some money and to release Lizz Wright's debut album Salt. Although there's one odd thing about their promotion...if you set up a website with the artist name (lizzwright.net), then avoid writing things like 'under construction - new site launch in April' still be seen online in what's nearly Mid-May at the time of writing this review. But since Salt is such a great album we all will be lenient with Lizz' label :-)
Although Verve tries to sell Salt as Jazz album it's one of the finest soul albums (with strong jazz influences though) so far this year. The overall feeling is a more relaxed, southern and organic athmosphere and if you like N'Dambi, Conya Doss, Ledisi or Erykah Badu you'll certainly love this album as well.
Lizz Wright was born on January 22, 1980 in Hahira, Georgia, the youngest of three siblings whose father was a minister and whose mother sang gospel at his services. "I've been singing in church since I was six - I was drafted into it," laughs Lizz. "My brother and sister and I used to sing as a trio when my dad would preach. If we weren't at home doing homework or chores, we were in the car with our parents and on the way to church and different revivals." By the age of fourteen, she taught herself piano well enough to "help my dad in church by playing a little bit."
Houston County High School broadened Wright's musical horizon. "I was in several choirs," she recalls. "I would sing in duet and quartet groups as well. We won several regional and state medals. In my last year, I won a National Choral Award." During this period she also discovered jazz, via Marian McPartland's NPR jazz program.
After graduating high school, she enrolled at Georgia State University in Atlanta. "My major was music performance; I only did one year. When you have a major in vocal performance, you pretty much have to study classical. There wasn't a vocal jazz program and I didn't want to do classical. So on the side I would work with small jazz combos so I could learn standards. That's what I really wanted to do."
In the summer of '98, Lizz relocated 200 miles south to Macon. It was a turning point. "I worked for awhile, and lived by myself. I figured out what I wanted to do and why I wanted to do it. I would drive two hours several nights a week to Atlanta just to sit down and hear some jazz. After a bit, I was sitting in at jam sessions." It was at a '99 jam session at Churchill Grounds that Lizz Wright was "discovered" and invited to join the Atlanta band In the Spirit. Within a year's time, Creative Loafing, Atlanta's alternative newspaper, anointed In the Spirit the best jazz group in Atlanta and said of Lizz Wright: "Wright is truly a singer's singer. Her beautiful tone and exquisite phrasing...point to the fact that Ms. Wright may well be Ms. Right. She has it all."
Well, Creative Loafing is right, Lizz Wright has such a beatiful, rich warm and mature voice and it's hard to believe she's only 23 years old. But she's also a songwriter and wrote 5 out of the album's 12 songs, a fact that reminds me of the young Carmen Lundy and her first album that also was a mixture of standards and original compositions.
There are great renditions of Flora Purim's Open Your Eyes You Can Fly, Mongo Santamaria's Afro Blue or Gordon Jenkin's Goodbye. Even Lizz version of Soon As I Get Home from the musical The Whiz sounds fine in the context of the album (by the way it's basically the same song Stephanie Mills recorded as Home in 1989 for her album of the same name).
Add to this Lizz' own songs Salt, Eternity, Fire, Blue Rose and Silence and you have a soul album par excellence that you can listen to over and over again and that will still sound fresh in ten years time. Since Salt is released on a major label there's really no excuse this time for you, not to go into your local record store and get a copy.