20 April 2015 (released)
21 April 2015
When we last heard from Melody Gardot, her globe-trotting travels had inflected her trademark sound with exotic new flavours. With her new album ‘Currency of Man’, Melody takes us on another musical voyage. This time she has travelled not to new places but back in time for musical inspiration, while rooting her lyrics in a social consciousness that inescapably and urgently speaks of the here and now.
With its funky bass rhythms, Hammond organ retro-soul brass arrangements, euphoric gospel singers and esoteric orchestrations, the songs on ‘Currency of Man’ are the very antithesis of ‘smooth jazz’. In a departure that is sure to surprise her more conservative fans, they transport us back to the late Sixties and early Seventies. Grooving through the middle of this melange of steamy soul and funk is Melody Gardot, the Grammy-nominated international best-selling singer, songwriter and self-styled “citizen of the world.”
Beneath the new-found musical exuberance lie a series of sharp observations of tumultuous times in our troubled world. Snatches of radio static and crackly voices collected from field recordings lend a documentary air that serve to underline the social dimension of songs centred on real-life characters observed on the streets of Los Angeles, where ‘Currency of Man’ was recorded. Food banks and soup kitchens feed the helpless, homeless and hungry; race and religion tear our planet apart as never before; war, famine and poverty are our constant companions. Amid the chaos of a world turned upside down, the universal search for love, truth and peace goes on.
These are the subjects Melody addresses on ‘Currency of Man’: her fourth studio album and a brave new departure for an artiste who has constantly stretched definitions of her music since she burst on to the music scene in 2006 with the spare, smoky piano jazz of ‘Worrisome Heart’.
Mainstream success followed with its 1.5 million-selling successor, ‘My One And Only Thrill’, for which she teamed up with legendary Grammy Award-winning producer Larry Klein, introducing tropical elements to her music. That global influence expanded further on 2012’s lavishly orchestrated ‘The Absence’, a critically acclaimed development in which Melody’s travels in Argentina and Africa, Brazil and Portugal, introduced the exotic rhythms of samba, tango, bossa nova and calypso to her sound.
‘Currency of Man’ finds Melody reunited with producer Larry Klein (Joni Mitchell, Herbie Hancock, Madeleine Peyroux).
Music-News.com caught up with melody Gardot in London's Soho Hotel to find out more.
Check out our exclusive interview below.
‘Currency of Man’ will be released on Decca on June 1st 2015.
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