Jane Siberry Maria CD

Maria Review by Stewart Mason [-] Jane Siberry's fourth and final album during her seven-year tenure on the major label Reprise Records, Maria is a decisive break from the lushly layered art pop of her previous work. Recorded with a quintet of jazz players led by trumpeter David Travers-Smith and pianist Tim Ray, Maria is Siberry's Astral Weeks, a song cycle of lengthy, slowly unfolding tunes lacking conventional pop song hooks but awash in hypnotic beauty. Siberry makes the comparison particularly plain on the first two tracks, "Maria" and "See the Child," which both feature incantatory vocals and rushes of cyclical, chanted phrases. A note in the CD liner says the album's basic tracks were recorded in a single three-day session in September 1994, and the songs' improvisatory freshness bears that out. Roughly balanced between jazz and pop in a manner roughly akin to Joni Mitchell's Mingus, the songs make a virtue of their stylistic freedom: even the closest thing to a conventional pop song here, "Lovin' Cup," features loose, off-the-cuff fills by Ray and Travers-Smith and Siberry's pleasantly meandering vocal melody over an atypically funky rhythm section powered by Christopher Thomas' discofied bass riff. The album's culmination, coming after two minutes' silence following the next to last track, "Oh My My" adds a tabla and sitar to further confuse the genre boundaries