3 panel foldout digipak. No booklet.
If you're not familiar with [Joanna Wang]'s discography, there's essentially this quid pro quo arrangement with the label where every time she wants to publish some of her own music, she has to do a cover album in exchange. This is one of the latterthough at least they've learned to embrace the jazzy parts of easy-listening music a little more since the Start From Here days. The question's simple, thenare any of these covers successful? That is, do they make noticeable improvements upon the originals? It's difficult for me to be too specific on this matterafter all, what I might point out as an improvement might get rid of what you liked in the first placebut most of them at least bring something new to the table, and only a handful are straight-up unnecessary ("You've Got a Friend" and "Stay," in my opinionthe originals set too high a bar). Otherwise, the only "major improvement" on the English side is "Lemon Tree"the rest is pretty inoffensive (though I will note that the acoustic versions are generally worse, except for "Wild World").
The Chinese side, on the other hand, is a breath of fresh air. These are [Teresa Teng] and [Anita Mui] standardswhich means they've been covered to death by every artist in the Sinospherebut three out of four are obvious improvements ("" again being too good to begin with).
I suppose I should explain the five-star rating on ""it must have imprinted on me or something, because last year I listened to it upwards of a thousand times. And sure, I can try to rationalize this with some fancy jazz chords like I always dopart of the opening riff, for example, is ii7/II V79/II - V79/II ii7 V7alt I7, where "alt" is a jazz euphemism that's essentially the equivalent of shrugging your shoulders and hoping for the best (in this case it means that I didn't feel like writing out V79913)but that's just an attempt to justify an utterly irrational result with rational data, which is doomed to fail. No, the real reason has to do more with the pandemic, oddly enoughbecause when the lockdown started and gigs dried up, I couldn't reclaim the joy of improvisation by listening to Bill Evans or Oscar Peterson; they're much too polished to feel like my own handiwork. Real comping is meandering and dissonant (hopefully in a subtle way!), where you're trying the best you can to make something interesting out of a water-warped lead sheet you've played a million times before. It sounds like this. That, in combination with the wonderfully enveloping atmosphere it provides and the kind of "everything is going to be alright" vibe that the vocals provide, is why it rates so unnecessarily highly. And because of that "nostalgia," so to speak, I can overlook the unnecessary repetitions and weird pacingthat's just how it is sometimes. Ughmaybe some day I'll figure out how to keep album reviews concise.
Overall tier rating: B.
EAN: 886979599123
Sony Music Entertainment, 2011
Country: Taiwan
Condition: CDs - Excellent; Digipak - Good
C02
