Customer Reviews

Choices

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

If you're wondering about the appearance of Cornell West and Bilal, don't be confused -- this is a very musical, modern jazz CD, and the music is some of the best I've heard. The Terrance Blanchard projects make music that connects with you, is deeply emotional, and musically sophisticated at the same time. And the musicianship is top notch...Terrence Blanchard on trumpet, Lionel Louke on guitar, Kendrick Scott on Drums, Fabian almazan on Piano, and Walter Smith III on Sax. I also like the appearance of Bilal (vocals on two tracks) and was thrilled to hear this band play his beautiful song "When will you call"

This is an amazing CD, and as much as I love 'Flow' and 'A Tale of God's Will', this album in my opinion has built upon those. The compositions are breath-taking, my favorites being Derrick Hodge's "Winding Roads" and "A New World." The other songs are strong as well, but those simply took my breath away.

I'll be honest at first I wasn't sure what to make of the excerpts of conversation of Blanchard & Cornel West placed in between most of the tunes on this album, the reason for this is I'd rather have the music make it's own statement & another reason is personally I find Dr. West alittle cheesy & long winded but I respect Blanchard for putting out an album that strays from the everyday jazz album. I think the music on this album is very strong & most if not all the band members contributed compositions. The supporting cast was the main reason I bought this album. Blanchard has done what Miles Davis had done with his great quintets by recruiting some of the best & brightest young musicians on the scene. Walter Smith iii on tenor sax is a great player with a unique sound & also a good composer bringing his tune Him or Me to this album, Walter Smith is starting to appear everywhere these days as a leader with three albums to his credit. His debut albumCasually Introducing as well as a live album & co op with sax man Mark SmallBronze. On acoustic & electric bass is Derek Hodge a young monster bassist who has worked with Mulgrew Miller's trio appearing on two great live Mulgrew records, Hodge contributed the tune A New World(created inside the walls of imagination) which in my opinion is the best song on the album. Lionel Loueke returns on guitar being on Blanchard's last two Blue Note albums, his presence is subtle & understated but he does get in a few good rips favoring his solidbody electric's clean sound with an octave effect which is becoming his trademark sound. On piano is a young man who is a new name to me Fabian Almazan who contributes the tune Hugs & a aggressive ornate piano style similar to Brad Meldau. Completing the rhythm section on drums is Kendrick Scott a 29 year old texan groove machine who if you haven't been keeping up with the jazz scene is almost everyone's favorite drummer, only 29 & already appeared on close to 100 jazz albums playing with jazz master Herbie Hancock & young lions Jimmy Greene & Seamus Blake as well as recording under his own name, needless to say this is one bad man on the drum kit, the chops of Tony Williams & the finesse of Paul Motain with some church spirit. Terence is sounding great as usual with his unique trumpet sound & singular writing style. The music in my opinion is a sort of post bop infused with a modern sort of musical fusion that you get from a diverse group of guys such as this. I'd like to close by saying don't let "Cornel West's tirade" like one of our fellow reviewers eloquently put it put you off of this album because the music out weights anything Dr. West has to say. Check this great album out.

The moment I heard that Terence Blanchard's quintet was coming to the University I live 5 minutes away from, I made sure that I had tickets, and when the day came and I saw this group live, I was blown away. The group came about half an hour late because bad weather meant some plane flights from NYC were canceled, so some of the members of the group had to take a train to Philly to take a plane from there to North Carolina, where I live. The group was mostly the same as the one on this record, but Blanchard's longtime tenor counterweight Brice Winston was back in place of Walter Smith III and Michael Olatuja took Derrick Hodge's place. At first, only the rhythm section took the stage, and the concert began with a beautiful bass solo by Olatuja as Blanchard and Winston walked out on stage. As Fabian Almazan came in with some gorgeous harmonies, and Kendrick Scott started playing lightly, Terence played some of the spoken-word by Dr. Cornel West. When it finished, Blanchard and Winston played the theme to "Byus" and then they launched into brilliant improvisation, full of contrasts of dynamics and furious passages next to astoundingly lyrical ones. They played several more tunes, each of them very extended, but always fascinating. Mr. Blanchard also talked to the crowd, and proved himself to be a very articulate and funny man as well as a brilliant musician. It was one of the greatest concerts I've ever seen. This concert, with performances I've seen by Kenny Garrett and by David Binney with Chris Potter sitting in at New York's 55 Bar during a recent trip to NY, have made me a lot more optimistic about the future of jazz than I had been.

After the concert, I got to meet the musicians and got their autographs, and they were all humble and personable. Some people were selling this disc outside as well, and I did not hesitate to buy it.

It is only because of that concert I found this disc to be mildly disappointing. The compositions on here are the same ones that were featured at the concert, but the improvisations never get to the levels of passion that I saw exhibited at the concert. I feel like this band was limited by the recording studio and the number of compositions they chose to include. In the concert, they played 7 songs at most, and the concert was about two hours long. On this recording, there are 15 songs featured in about an hour and a quarter. At the concert, they simply had more space to stretch out and really build their solos up to a climax. Here, they seem cut short when I feel like they are on the verge of getting to something fantastic. This record has the same moments of exquisite subdued beauty that the concert had, but it never reaches the same heights as the players did in concert. What comes out of this is an excellent record, but one that left me with a feeling of disappointment. Part of it was that seeing and hearing a player do it live is always superior because of audio quality and spirit, but at the same time, this record features a much more subdued feeling than the live performance. I also feel like part of it is the absence of Brice Winston on this record. While Smith is an excellent player, he never seems to get in the zone the way Winston does, and I personally love it when musicians get to that level of intensity. And with Winston as his foil instead of Smith, I feel like Blanchard reaches for those moments more as well.

I still would recommend this disc, but if you have the resources and the opportunity to see Blanchard live, you should waste no time trying to get tickets. He is one of modern jazz's best players, composers, and leaders.

Terrence Blanchard continues to make great original music that continues to sit in a top jazz world. Great arrangements, solos, and the addition of Bilal's vocals were a great touch. The sounds he creates on the trumpet are so unique that there is no other player out there that can touch him. Cornell West's commentary gave the CD a tremendous amount of truth and stirred up many thoughts in my head. Along with Roy Hargrove's Emergence this is the best Jazz CD to come out in 2009. Also I have the great opportunity to see Terrence's band live in DC tonight at Blues Alley, so I am very excited!

Best Tracks:
D's Choice
Hacia Del Aire
Choices
Winding Roads
Touched By an Angel

I'm a big fan of Blanchard but the spoken introduction to the songs are very distracting (and not very interesting). The music is OK, not really up to Blanchard's standards but I can't imagine who would want to listen to the introductions more than once. This CD goes in my pile of "never listen to again".

Choices features some of the sweetest, most emotionally satisfying modern jazz of this generation, sprinkled with the flavor of prime (pre-electric) Miles Davis. It also features occasional spoken word interludes/intrusions by some scholarly philosopher named Cornell West. Still, the quality of the music outweighs the baloney. "Hacia Del Aire" is a tasty, bluesy ballad, featuring Blanchard's trumpet and Fabian Almazan on piano. Vocalist Bilal adds nicely to "Touched By An Angel, and especially "D's Choice", where he sounds a bit like Stevie Wonder. This band, comprised of great young musicians, ought to be heard by the folks who watch crap like American Idull, and think they've heard music. The title tune allows Terrence to play some luscious solos over its six minutes. The sidemen don't get to solo that much, but their contributions, musical and compositional, are tasty. Talents like these young men leave jazz, as with blues, in good hands in the 21st Century.

If your a Cornell West intellectual fan and LOVE JAZZ this album is for you. This is an awesome purchase and a great vendor that I got it from.

"Choices" by the Terence Blanchard Group, to me, is vibrant, living music that goes beyond boundaries of race, culture and language, and speaks to a generation of jazz followers and lovers. For that reason, I can't recommend it highly enough.

The last time I heard from Blanchard musically in my life was his excellent 1993 release "The Malcolm X Jazz Suite", featuring a jazz reworking of his score for Spike Lee's epic film "Malcolm X". I caught Blanchard and his then-group at a gig here in Japan when they toured in support of the album. The pop-rock club in Osaka were they played was half-full, but Blanchard and his band were swinging hard all the same. After the show, on a hunch, I headed over to a nearby straight-jazz club and sure enough, Blanchard's band members (minus Terence, unfortunately) showed up at the small club and played an after-hours impromptu set that brought the house down.

Even before that, Blanchard's debut release in 1991 was part of the soundtrack of my life, and many late nights/early mornings of writing work were done to the sounds of that first album playing over and over as I worked.

After picking up Blanchard's most recent work, "Choices", I see just how much I've missed these past 15 years or more. It's been a pure joy catching up with the trumpeter/composer: "Choices" shows a young lion of jazz whose work has matured, developed and helped usher in a new generation of jazz music. In many ways "Choices" carries on Blanchard's pushing of the boundaries of jazz, and nowhere is that most evident than having Dr. Cornel West, the renowned academic, as a running commentator on some of the album's tracks.

Dr. West, who calls himself on the album a "jazz man in the world of ideas, a blues man in the life of the mind," may not be for everybody (I happen to agree with and respect him), but his comments are always thought-provoking and full of inspiration -- like good jazz is. Some of the music on this album plays over Dr. West as he speaks, interweaving ideas and music in a very natural, swinging, soulful way.

The mellow title track, "Choices", features just such interweaving of music and spoken word, with Blanchard's trumpet-playing sounding subdued and reflective. The track "HUGs (Historically Underrepresented Groups)" picks up the pace and features Blanchard and bandmates playing uptempo and reminding me much of the dynamic playing in his early solo recordings.

"A New World" is a punching, guitar-funk-driven track that I always love listening to. It is introduced by Dr. West's comments on the hope for the future in a post-Obama world, and for some reason I can see in my mind's eye a second-line Mardi Gras procession moving victoriously through the streets of post-Katrina New Orleans to the sound of this song. It's a real jazz rocker. The heartwarming tune "Winding Roads", which is interspersed with Dr. West's comments and light vocals by neosoul singer Bilal, also flows well with the other tunes on the CD.

The only thing that doesn't really work for me on this album, to be honest, are the vocals by Bilal on several tracks. It just seems to me that the jazz compositions are strong enough to stand well on their own musically without the extra vocal work. But it seems that Blanchard wanted to put some extra R&B feeling behind some of the straight-ahead jazz compositions, so in that sense he succeeds.

Whenever I listen to this album -- and any album by Blanchard -- the feeling that most often comes up inside me is pride: pride that our generation is carrying on the jazz tradition in a very positive way, just as previous generations of jazz musicians have done before. Blanchard has said in an interview that the next generation of young jazz players coming up represents a "quiet revolution" of the music being carried onward. If that is true, then I'm excited and inspired even more about the future of jazz and I know that it is in good hands.

A friend of mine laughingly called jazz "old people's music", but nothing could be further from the truth. Jazz is for all generations of people, young and old alike, and Terence Blanchard stakes that claim for his generation with this recording. Jazz music is living, breathing music that has much to offer beyond the artificial boundaries of race, culture and language, and much to say to the current generation of jazz followers.

Now that I have caught up with Blanchard's music after all these years, I know I have to go back and catch up on his past works, with "A Tale of God's Will (A Requiem for Katrina)" being right at the top of my list.

Life is all about the choices we make, as Dr. West says on this album, and one of the best musical choices I myself have made in a long time is buying this album, "Choices", by Terence Blanchard. I recommend it wholeheartedly to anyone who wants to exercise their own choice on following the past, present and future course of jazz music. A masterpiece of a record.

Well, here we go another racial diatribe by wealthy Prof. West and his Harvard 7 digit income. Except for Him or Me...this is not music, jazz or anything but a politcal, socio lame effort on Concord's part to take my money, not caring what color the green is!
I am writing Concord demanding my money back. Balnchard now is on my suck list!