I bought "Somebody Special" (Soul Note, 1987) somewhat randomly a few weeks ago and gave it an initial (distracted) listen yesterday, after reading your post. She's accompanied by Steve Lacy, Franco D'Andrea (piano), Jean-Jacques Avenel (bass) and Oliver Johnson (drums).
I was left with the feeling that the album doesn't really play to her strengths. For example, on "For All We Know," one of two standards, she can't resist the urge to stretch, crescendo and tremolo every single vowel she comes across, it seems like. As a result, the song has no meaning and it's not surprising the instrumental solos afterwards sound uninspired.
There are better moments, of course. The "For All We Know" disaster may be attributable to the language barrier. "Quiet Children" is in Italian and she sings it in a far more natural and meaningful way (even if I don't understand the lyrics). There are some wordless melodies that are quite nice too, but the vocal parts never seem to last very long, which is odd.
The music is sometimes quite free, but is more often in, swinging or slow-funky like the title tune. Ghiglioni sometimes jumps into the free sections like another instrument, which is interesting. D'Andrea plays some particularly nice solos on the original compositions.
Anyway, she has a lot of CDs and I don't know if this one is representative at all. I did
read that "SONB" was particularly well-recieved by the Italian press.
Linear Mode
