JEWELS 'N' JAZZ

JEWELS 'N' JAZZ

SADE Diamond Life (Portrait) JOHN MARTYN Sapphire (Island)

Richard C. Walls

Sade (pronounced Shar-DAY) is the stage name of 25-year-old Nigerian-born London-bred Helen

Folasade Adu and right now she’s very hot in the U.K., which is sometimes a prologue to U.S. success and sometimes not. The right person in the right place, different in a superficial way but fitting in with current pop-dancefashion trends—these aspects of her appeal probably won’t travel well. To these ears she sounds like a candidate for VH-1, the new excessively gentle cable station for aging pop/rock fans, being a slick, sometimes pleasant, easy listening singer of love songs. Sade projects a stunningly exotic image but her voice, breathy but generally devoid of much inflection, is ordinary. A recent article in USA Today conjured Nina Simone and Mae West to describe

this new pop phenom, but I think Sheila E. might be more to the point. Her band, three Brits who pose well for the album cover, make competent anonymous dance music with (and this may account for the advance word about Sade being “jazzy”) an occasional, mechanical sax lick thrown in.

The album does have its moments. “Sally,” a somewhat ambitious ballad, is a vignette about an urban angel of mercy and gives Sade the chance to actually show some emotion and display a dramatic range generally not evident on the rest of the album. “Why Can’t We Live Together,” the 1972 Timmy Thomas plea for brotherhood, gets a refreshingly simple organ-conga-bass arrangement which coaxes a second heartfelt vocal from our

star. Apparently, the further away she gets from the trendy, the more relaxed and expressive her style becomes.

Another artiste mixing contempo dance music with (in this case more than just a rumor of) jazz overtones is living legend (17 years as a cult figure—some kinda record) John Martyn. But even when the Glasgow-born ex-folkie’s surroundings are by-the-book commercial, as on the title cut of his new release, his vocal style is as idiosyncratic as ever. Sounding at various times like Michael McDonald, Joe Cocker, Van Morrison, Tom Waits and himself, Martyn sings with a romantic slur that obscures his lyrics while making his feelings as clear as can be. Obviously the stuff that cults are made of, you either connect with Martyn’s intense, lyrically imprecise emotionality or you don’t. Like Sade he specializes in alternately rueful or ecstatic love songs though always with a fatal undercurrent—while Sade sounds hopeful despite it all, Martyn sounds battered despite his hope. And though the arrangements here are generally tasteful, they’re weird around the edges—the Linn drums beat on, the guitars and keyboards chord dutifully and suddenly an elephant will appear “Acid Rain”) or maybe a string being pulled through a dixie cup

(“Watching Her Eyes”). And finally, being a cult figure and all, Martyn can make the sort of departure from the mundane that Sade’s this-year’s-model stature precludes (“Sally” notwithstanding) and so we get “Coming In On Time,” which sounds like European fusion jazz meets the Doobie Brothers, the far side of midnight feeling and seemingly free-associative lyrics of “Rope Soul’d,” and a wonderfully punchdrunk rendition of “Over The Rainbow.”

Two versions of romance then, decked out in mid-’80s finery, one flawlessly tight and fashionable (in England, anyway), the other slightly fashionable but kind of a mess. Myself, I like the sloppy version.