Just nominated as "Vocal Jazz Album of the Year" at the 2012 Juno Awards (to take place in Ottawa, CAN on April 1, 2012)
Liner notes written by jazz writer, Mark Miller:
Consider, if you will, the kite — graceful and quick to soar, responsive to the prevailing winds with a mind entirely of its own. Consider, if you please, Fern Lindzon’s new CD Two Kites, which is all of those things, musically and metaphorically speaking, and more.
Two Kites, of course, is also a quirky little song by the great Brazilian composer Antonio Carlos Jobim, a song that Fern sings here with a smile — a song that she clearly enjoys for its sense of abandon, its surprises and its non-sequitors. Not every song on this, her second CD is quite so light of heart, but she finds something to explore in each of them as a singer, pianist and arranger, be it the wary poignance of Distance, for example, the newly beckoning sensuality of Basin Street Blues, the stirring power in Yiddish of Yam Lid or the wistful hopes of If He’s Ever Near.
In that respect, Two Kites shows the same restless spirit of adventure that defined Fern’s first release, Moments Like These from 2008 — indeed, the same spirit of adventure that saw her begin as singer and pianist in the classical tradition before moving onto the Toronto jazz scene and now working comfortably beyond it, whether playing with klezmer bands, participating in free improvisation or writing the score for a classic Buster Keaton comedy.
This is typical of the 21st-century jazz musician — not eclecticism for its own sake, but a broad awareness of styles, traditions, sources and references employed smartly in the service of a meaningfully personal body of work that is increasingly like no other.
Fern is as comfortable toying with the titles and lyric turns of the illustrious Broadway composers Rodgers and Hart in her vocalese Moon in the Sky, sung here as a prelude to one of their most famous songs, My Romance, as she is drawing on the Russian composer Nicholai Medtner’s Sonata-Reminiscenza to set off the Yiddish song Dona Dona — which, in turn, she floats over a flowing rhythm in 11/4, rather as her contemporary in jazz, the New York composer Maria Schneider, might.
This is not simply for show. It works. It complements — and is complemented by — the clarity and directness of Fern’s singing, so admirably free of affectation, and the care and detail of her piano playing. With her fellow musicians, saxophonist Mike Murley, bassist George Koller and drummer Nick Fraser, wonderfully assured and attentive in support, she has caught the prevailing winds of contemporary jazz and responded, yes, with a mind entirely of her own.
Mark Miller
Jazz historian, author, critic
Toronto
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