Champian featured on Citizen Jazz (in French, with English translation)
This article is originally in French and can be read by clicking here. What follows is an English translation by Mark Stout.
In her homage to Charlie Parker, who would have been 100 years old in 2020, Ms. Fulton sought to draw inspiration from his recordings rather than reproducing a verbatim impression of his genius, and boy, did she deliver!
Stealing hearts with her rakishly glamourous charm, this native southerner, having made a name for herself in the Big Apple, owns her southern persona unabashedly. Her rich unaffected nasal tone reaches into seductive falsetto range through swinging flights and occasional darker melancholy tones and is never mundane.
She moves in and out of the rhythmic and melodic structure of the music in search of an authentically bluesy lyrical quality, inspiring in the listener a sense of the unusual in the familiar world of jazz standards. And so it is in her duet with Scott Hamilton on the reprise of the head at the end of Star Eyes—unless this emblematic trad-jazz sax man is also going off track (utterly improbable)—we understand that playing with the rules of strict musical accuracy is the trademark sound of her singing.
And my, how she swings on the piano! She conjures the spirit of Erroll Garner— evoking but not imitating—with that subtle left-hand shift that melts in the mouth like the sweetest funky candy. Her pianistic sensitivities are orchestral. Her right hand, walking on air with the lightness of a songbird, fluttering over the harmonic changes, the better to alight on the wires of the melodic lines. She achieves phrasing worthy of a Bud Powell, particularly as she trades choruses with the drummer on All God’s Chillun Got Rhythm. Even at high speed, she knows how to tell a story filled with enticing aromas evoking the legendary performers who came before her. And, through her sense of the space that she occupies, she makes the listener want to take to the dance floor, creating a gentle rocking sensation where we can imagine her swaying her hips to the music—for truly, this is the source of her music. She’s a heartbreaker, exceedingly sensual.
Here, she once again calls on her father, who bathed her in the baptismal fonts of jazz by repeatedly playing the album Charlie Parker with Strings while she was still in her mother’s womb. A formidable flugelhornist in his own right, this erstwhile traveling companion of Clark Terry, Papa Fulton was clearly the man for the job. She had no
other choice but to hire him for this album paying homage to Bird. In her take on Quasimodo, done as a trio, she brushes up against the incunabula of Bird’s style like a frightened, blushing debutante.
However you cut it, she is well served on this album, as with her previous albums, by a peerless rhythm section, recruited some 10 years ago, comprising two Japanese expats living in New-York, Hide Tanaka (an astonishingly elegant bass man with unparalleled control) and Fukushi Tainaka (a solid drummer, at ease rhythmically and authentic in the colors of his playing). Still, she’s the one who teases out the contributions of the individual musicians, eliciting their responses, calling their solos, with a rare chemistry that we hope will give rise to other gems of equally fine quality. The choice to end the album with Bluebird gives her the opportunity to deal a sort of expertly targeted death blow to an approach to interpreting Bird’s repertoire that is all too often patriarchal, demonstrating in this ostensibly simple 12-bar form fraught with peril that she is an accomplished jazzwoman who knows the classics and knows how to transcend them.
