With the wonderful lead vocals of Carmen Gomes, the Carmen Gomes Inc. band delivers an album I find totally engaging from start to finish. They make these songs completely their own while honoring the great Ray Charles in so doing.
Carmen Gomes Inc., Ray! Sound Liaison. 2021 (DXD) HERE
In making this album, Peter Bjørnild (bassist) writes, "We quickly realized that we did not want to make a tribute album. Rather we would pay our respects to Ray by following the advice Ray gave to Willie Nelson at a recording session: 'Don’t think about how anybody else does it, just do it the way that YOU feel it.' So we took the songs back to their bare essentials, tried to hear them as if they had just been written and in so doing making them our own."
And a fresh sound they indeed deliver. This is their music, with a nod to the master here and there. Never over-produced, always respecting each other, the musicians find a nice balance of supporting each other, challenging each other, complementing each other, never stepping on one another.
The song that I most enjoyed on my first listen was "CC Rider" by Ma Rainey and Lena Arant (circa 1924, also known as "See See Rider Blues"). As Bjørnild comments in the liner notes, "Here Tettero’s guitar is the 2nd protagonist in this story of a love affair taking a wrong turn. The guitar is of equal importance to Gomes’ voice, it’s the CC Rider Carmen is singing about. Listen how they keep on challenging each other yet never get in each other's way. That kind of communication and musical empathy is a rare find."
A rare find indeed. And a rare treat to hear.
Sound Liaison's recordings continue to impress me with their very clean, transparent, and precisely localized sound. Recording engineer Frans de Rond's signature is readily apparent in the purity of sound and precise placement of performers that he achieves in this multi-microphone studio recording. If you've heard his "One Mic" recordings on Sound Liaison, you will know how special his recordings can be. I was a bit hesitant at first knowing this would be a multiple microphone outing. But, he pulls it off superbly in a highly phase coherent, tightly knit, outcome that belies it's multi-mic roots. As with his other recordings, this displays great depth, and almost physically palpable placement of the musicians in the soundstage.
Highest recommendation.
