Brian Blade
Mama Rosa

It is extraordinary that with a palette deliberately sprinkled with soft, subtle, and calm hues, one can generate such an intimate intensity as that contained in this fervent solo work by Mr. Brain Blade.

Known for lending his remarkable work behind the drums in the presence of well-known champions of contemporary Jazz (Shorter, Garrett, Redman, to name a few), in the middle of last year he decided to create an album that, in fact, does not feature even a scant ounce of true and proper Jazz, as one might have expected, and instead shuns easy classifications while being strongly tied to the tradition of American singer-songwriters of the last forty years.

A work in which our sober forty-year-old from Louisiana engages with a song form as classic as it is not at all banal, concentrating his energies in a sure and passionate manner almost exclusively on singing, accompanied in almost all of the 13 tracks—some of which are decidedly excellent (“Mercy Angel,” “All That Was Yesterday”) in their balanced genuineness—by sparse tinges of acoustic guitar and by graceful piano counterpoints for an album that, once given a first listen, I would dare to call inevitable.