2011年9月23日星期五

Music Review of Ruthie Foster's Live At Antone's Album

The great thing about a Ruthie Foster song is that you never quite know where it’s going Rosetta Stone to go. It might start as a quiet ballad before morphing into an up-tempo song built on a New Orleans-style rhythm, as on Woke Up This Mornin’, from her first live album/DVD combo Live At Antone’s.Or it might kick off with the lone strains of Foster’s melismatic vocals prior to turning into Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s triumph of blues-meets-gospel, Up Above (I Hear Music In The Air), where the band members contribute lovely harmonies before building to a climax as passionate as anything Foster’s ever sung. That unpredictability is part of what defines Foster as an artist, as well as what keeps listeners involved long after a less flexible artist might have lost his or her audience. Ruthie Foster's Live At Antone's Seven albums into her career, Foster’s audience is still expanding. It’s easy to see why: on the brief, five-minute interview that accompanies the footage on the DVD part of this dual-disc package, Foster refers to her sound as gospel-blues-infused soul. She shares that the artists on her iPod include Bettye LaVette, Sheryl Crow and Sam Cooke it’s hard to imagine a more crowd-friendly balance between roots styles and pop influences. In this performance recorded at Austin’s famed blues club Antone’s, opening Rosetta Stone Italian number Stone Love, an original composition, exemplifies her standing in the blues world: the soulful, 1960s-inspired number is nothing fancy just Foster getting the chance show that she’s not a blues singer, but rather a singer, period, capable of zeroing in on the heart of a song regardless of genre.Runaway Soul I Really Love you is pop-tinged, with a hint of reggae in the way the rhythm accentuates the off-beats. (You Keep Me) Hanging On, isn’t the Supremes tune, but it does have a classic soul sound that showcases the influence of Foster’s beloved Sam Cooke. [Rosetta Stone Software ] On Up Above My Head (I Hear Music In The Air), the Sister Rosetta Tharpe song, Foster begins with an understated vocal melisma before turning it into something much more dramatic: lovely backing vocals by her band members, as well as a sparkling keyboard solo by Scottie Miller, help the song build to a soaring climax, with Foster’s passionate singing the focal point. The highlight of both the CD and the DVD is Foster’s original Runaway Soul, from her 2002 album of the same name. She asks the crowd, is it all right if we mix the blues with the gospel this evening? Since that’s her signature sound, she already knows the answer, and proceeds to offer Rosetta Stone Korean up a traditional, mid-tempo blues shuffle with high-energy keyboard solos between verses.

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