The Growing Season

On *The Growing Season*, singer/songwriter Rebecca Martin is backed by a group of jazz musicians who do an excellent job of fleshing out her jazz-tinged folk-pop. The band — Martin on vocals and acoustic guitar, guitarist/keyboardist Kurt Rosenwinkel, bassist Larry Grenadier, and drummer Brian Blade — is a study in restraint, concision, and taste. A just-right vibraphone part, a soaring electric guitar tone, the drummer’s cool pulse, and other elements make these arrangements shine. The lyrics are as sharply chiseled as the music and they cover a lot of ground: love (“A Million Miles”), war (“After Midnight”), death (“Free At Last” and “You’re Older”), and other subjects. The album opens strongly with “The Space in a Song to Think,” with Martin backed by hypnotic acoustic guitar, electric piano comping, and the rhythm section’s laid-back groove. There are a number of gems here, but “Just a Boy” stands out. The track moves effortlessly from light pop verses to a quietly dramatic chorus, and like much of *The Growing Season*, it’s both mysterious and accessible.

"Rebecca had come down to New York from rural Maine and had a band called ONCE BLUE with singer guitarist Jesse Harris. Their album on EMI still sounds playful and timeless, as if Blossom Dearie had recorded with Steely Dan. A series of projects followed: an album of standards, MIDDLEHOPE, which the NY Times named one of the ten best jazz albums of 2002; a lovely album of her own songs, PEOPLE BEHAVE LIKE BALLADS; a collaboration with legendary drummer Paul Motian, that led to a fine cd, ON BROADWAY VOL 4, or THE PARADOX OF CONTINUITY. THE GROWING SEASON is an album of songs about motherhood, about living in the world and living in your body. There is an effortlessness about it, buoyed by the lighter-than-air rhythms of drummer Brian Blade, the supple rightness of Larry Grenadier’s beautiful, emphatic bass, the otherworldly chordings of guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel, all anchored by Rebecca’s elegant songs, lovely, picked guitar and smokey, generous voice. It's a voice that seems to leave nothing out: sex and death and breakfast and wind in the trees and tax forms and laughter and night. All at once. Listen….. "