Lizz Wright "The Orchard"

Bringing It All Back Home
Singer Lizz Wright Tries to Keep Things Simple on Her New Album

By ROBERT J. HUGHES
February 22, 2008; Page W2

Jazz vocalist Lizz Wright decided it was time to return to her roots. For her new CD, she tried to capture the simplicity of the blues and gospel music she heard growing up in the rural town of Hahira, Ga. The daughter of a minister, she sang in church there with her two siblings. "I come from a place where we don't use a lot of words," Ms. Wright says. "It's really about emoting."
The 28-year-old Ms. Wright has earned praise for her versions of song standards like "A Taste of Honey" and Neil Young's "Old Man," which highlighted her warm contralto voice in understated jazz and R&B arrangements. Her first two albums, "Salt" (2003) and "Dreaming Wide Awake" (2005), were hits on Billboard's contemporary jazz chart. The tunes on those albums were predominantly by other writers. On "The Orchard," Ms. Wright wanted to make a more personal statement, co-writing eight of the new album's 12 tracks.
The album has a looser feel than Ms. Wright's previous releases. Like "Dreaming Wide Awake," it was produced by Craig Street, who has worked with Cassandra Wilson and k.d. lang. Other musicians on "The Orchard" include Toshi Reagon, who co-wrote many of the songs, and guitarist and longtime Bob Dylan sideman Larry Campbell. The songs range from the slow-building, moody "Coming Home," which kicks off the compilation, to a rapturous folk waltz, "Song for Mia."
In addition to the new material, Ms. Wright includes several songs that were made famous by others, though Ms. Wright puts her own stamp on them. For example, she sings Led Zeppelin's "Thank You," a song she first heard when Ms. Reagon played it for her on an acoustic guitar. Ms. Wright also sings Ike Turner's "I Idolize You," which she discovered in a documentary featuring Ike and Tina Turner. Ms. Turner's performance brought to mind Ms. Wright's hometown years. "Her voice was really ferocious, the way some women used to sing in church, with a lot of grit, a lot of power," says Ms. Wright, who adds that she wanted to emulate that style in her own way.
Ms. Wright worked on "The Orchard" for about two years, spending the first in Georgia visiting her grandparents, "taking in a lot of information, looking at my home and just collecting feelings," she says. She took photographs of the area and made a slide show that she shared with her record company, Verve, to give executives a sense of how she wanted her album to evoke her hometown. Ms. Wright says that since she has become known for singing standards, it is now time for her own point of view. "If I'm going to interpret everybody else's story," she says, "I should make sure I'm in touch with my own.""Jazz vocalist Lizz Wright decided it was time to return to her roots. For her new CD, she tried to capture the simplicity of the blues and gospel music she heard growing up in the rural town of Hahira, Ga. The daughter of a minister, she sang in church there with her two siblings. "I come from a place where we don't use a lot of words," Ms. Wright says. 'It's really about emoting.'"