Maria

Artist: Jane Siberry
Label: Warner Bros / Wea
Category: Music

Average customer rating:

Media: Audio CD
Number Of Discs: 1

UPC: 093624591528
EAN: 0093624591528
ASIN: B000002MYH

Release Date: 1995-08-29

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Listmania:

Jane Siberry In Review
Art school classics
Top 15 albums i have ever heard
Music That Makes Me Happy
Mind Blowing Albums
Albums that I wouldn't want to live without
The great jams

Tracks:

Maria
See The Child
Honey Bee
Caravan
Lovin' Cup
Begat Begat
Goodbye Sweet Pumpkinhead
Would You Go?
Mary Had...
Oh My My

Similar Items:

The Walking
Bound By the Beauty
No Borders Here
When I Was a Boy
Hush

Customer Reviews:

Jane goes jazzy.......2005-01-23

With its prominent piano and saxophone, Maria has a meandering, jazzy feel. The sound is thus drastically unlike Siberry's work on masterpieces like Bound By The Beauty and When I was A Boy with their soaring, melodic ballads. Her voice and the instruments come up with some engaging textures in songs like Maria and See The Child, but Honey Bee just comes across as a lukewarm piece of lounge jazz.

Lovin' Cup is less jazzy and more uptempo with some impressive instrumental interplay and vocal improvisation like Meredith Monk, whilst Goodbye Sweet Pumpkinhead is a welcome return to the sad ballad form, and my favorite track on this album. Maria concludes with the 20-minute suite Oh My My that includes tabla and sitar for an atmospheric, ethereal feel.

Overall, and I say this as a devoted Siberry fan, I found this album disappointing. It has its merits obviously but only to fans of freeform jazz, I suspect. An admirable experiment, Maria doesn't lure one back for repeated listens and mercifully she didn't pursue this direction. I instead recommend her albums Bound By The Beauty, No Borders Here, The Speckless Sky and When I Was A Boy.

Too sophisticated to be radio-friendly.......2004-01-03

I bought this album because (1) I am interested in listening to the jazzy arrangements of this album; (2) Because Siberry, like her Mensa-level cohorts (Mary Margaret O'Hara, Laurie Anderson, Kate Bush) can dispense the song's inherent sentimentality and go right into the viscera of the music (I mean who can pull off "Lena is a Table" from her "The Walking" album better? Bjork might, but I digress). Maria is not just jazzy, its straight-ahead jazz with muted horns and sizzlingly walking basses! She was beyond par with "Lovin' Cup" where she proves she can be Janis Siegel-like in vocalese. Best of all is her dramatic and apt use of silence (sorry John Cage fans, but I think I like Siberry's use of silence here than Cage's in his own piano works) before she moved to Part 2 (yes Virginia, the album has a concept) and sang "Oh My My". A word or two about the 20-minute "Oh My My" -- the thing I like about avant-garde singing is the use of non-bel canto voices to do it well. Recent effort by ex-Manhattan Transfer's Laurel Masse via "Feather and Bone" proved that the best singers for ancient music are those whose voices have few accoutrements and where evenness is not a criterion. This album I had so much fun with. Like Fiona Apple's "Tidal" but that is another and different story.

Impressive, challenging and beautiful.......2003-02-20

Jane Siberry has remained one of the most extreme acquired tastes in music ever since she emerged with the revenge fantasy "Mimi On The Beach" in 1984. Her vocal style, clearly influenced by gospel but intensely dramatic and ranging from theatrical spoken words to angelic and beautiful melodies, will never appeal to anybody without repeated and patient listening. The musical backings on Siberry's work have often aided this dramatic, mystical singer/songwriter's undoubted vocal ability, but have been greatly varied from synth-rock in her early years to unaccompanied folk.

"Maria" was Siberry's effort at a jazz album, being recorded live in the studio with a jazz band including pianist Tim Ray, drummer Brian Blade, bassist Christopher Thomas, trumpeter David Travers-Smith and percussionist Ian McLauchan.

Following on from the hymnal and intensely mystical "When I Was A Boy", "Maria" (as one would guess from the title) continued the almost religious focus of that album, but without the languidness of "When I Was A Boy". This was evident on the title track, where Siberry appears to be singing an almost-religious invocation with the repeated "Maria, Maria", and on the beautifu standout track "See The Child", which was a most haunting and powerful tale of a lost child and a community's effort to find him.

"Honey Bee" moved back towards the typical nature-based lyrics of "Bound By The Beauty", but "Caravan", with the line "how far is the nearest place to kneel", certainly could be too religious for many listeners as she describes a difficult journey across some cold, arid landscape. "Begat Begat", with its lavish piano intro, and the line "mahalaleel shushan shibboleth tarshish shadrak vashtish jared shebadiah shushan mahaleel shekaniah amariah anathoth", was the most upbeat piece Siberry had written for some time, yet was so intensely mysterious that a listener could actually notice this depth without any real effort, especially during Siberry's piercing "Oh Oh".

"Goodbye Sweet Pumpkinhead" and "Would You Go" showed Siberry at her most solemn and her voice at its most beautiful, whilst "Mary Had A Little Lamb" set to a typical Siberry vocal accompaniment moving from rapid, almost spoken voices to a powerful gospel-type chorus, then to a reciting of earlier line from the title tune.

The second part of "Maria" was taken up by "Oh My My", a 20-minute epic dedicated apparently to Siberry's mother and brother.

Though "Maria" was the most coherent and least difficult album Siberry had done, Siberry will always remain an unacquirable taste for most listeners. Here is the place to start if you are confident about her, though.

maria.......2001-11-12

Maria is to be taken as a work, not as separate songs.
Take the time to listen to the entire cd, and you will truly find that this cd is art, and not just great music.

Jane's Masterpiece.......2001-05-30

This is Jane's finest hour. An amazing musical journey. Please buy it, you won't regret it.

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