From French record label Nato comes another wonderful batch of Jazz not Jazz. Look At Me, the debut from English multi-instrumentalist Terry Day, is unlike little else he would be known for. Surprisingly romantic, ragged but in a very smooth, put-together way, and (on the great bits) sounding not that dissimilar to the work of Paul Buchanan’s The Blue Nile, his focus on Look At Me appeared to be on putting his notable improvisation technique through a delicate, Pop prism. Urbane and quite witty, it’s a left-field collection of romantic music made for us wayward, left-field cats out there who can still appreciate a good love song.
Working primarily backing up others in the cross-Atlantic experimental and free Jazz improvisation scene, it was his drumming, piano, mandolin, or alto-sax-playing that can be heard in other NATO albums by Jean-François Pauvros, Max Eastley, Steve Beresford, or vocally, on songs by the likes of Paula Abdul (peep his backup vocals on Forever Your Girl…). Creatively, Terry extended his creativity towards painting and graphic design, contributing art to other’s albums with as much fervor as his own musical endeavors. Knowing this, it doesn’t take long to realize how vibrant, colorful, and multi-layered his own work could be.
Around 1987, NATO offered Terry his first chance to take a step forward and give it a go as a solo artist. Gifted with a voice that sounds like the love-child of Tom Waits and Ian Dury, Terry wisely enlisted the help of jazz vocalist Laura Davis to play the yin to his yang. With Laura she was able to fire a torch-lit breath onto tracks that required a certain seductive sound. On songs like “Love Love Love” you can hear that deliberately interesting dynamic play out with her smooth vocalisms being not so tenderly pricked by Terry’s gravelly-voice interlocutor. The music itself aptly catching the cool swings from sophistication to hard-nosed revelry.
Although Terry himself would write all the songs, he allowed others to put the mark on this music and would only add alto sax (where needed), vocals nearly everywhere possible. On Look At Me he allowed another gifted NATO-alumnus Tony Hymas to flesh out and arrange these visions into the multi-genre stylistic trips they came to be. Opening with something that approximates bad punk music almost seems like a ploy to shock you when the emotionally heavy music that would follow rears its head. I’ve already brought up one moonlit beauty but what about the others?
“Barbara, Barbra” seems to take sleazy inspiration from something of Kurt Weill’s work and repurpose it to create his own, updated take on a “threepenny opera” — ideas further repeated in “Liberace”. Featuring truly inspiring brass and woodwind arrangements, subtler masterpieces like the Laura Davis-led “Tears” give some, sparse acoustic beginning their grandest gesture by kitting it out with all sorts of open-throated, yearning horns blowing what approximates desolate shipyards, moonlit, rain-soaked city streets, and far off bits of warm, glowing invitation that recall the bittersweet canon of all our favorite weepies (from our sad-sack times).
If we can get over the light tropical groove of “Voulez-Vous” where the vocalisms tend to overshadow a spritely segue, then we can get to the final triptych winding this album done quite nicely. A Balearic masterpiece, “Luv Luv Luv” retools “Love Love” into a Toshifumi Hinata-esque sung-spoken meeting of digitally, synthetic love and warm, afterglowing synthesis.
Refracting the original image, Terry takes the helm, putting forth the wonders of wonders: “when bastards realize the importance of love”. Not understanding if he’s taking love songs to task or tasking himself to make one, the music seems to gently nudge Terry in the wisest direction — Laura singing gorgeous bits as the musical atmosphere around him builds to a breathtakingly romantic zeal — well, I won’t surprise you with what direction Terry choses to take. Wisely, it remains in the end all about “love”.
There’s just something about the brilliant soft-focus lilting-reggae of “So Comely” giving way to Terry’s sole, most forceful, instrumental contribution to the record “Sweet Albert” that brings me some joy. Here’s Terry picking up a sax trying to find a way into such an impressionistic ballad the only way he could. First he follow Laura’s vocals. Then, Tony’s melody leads him elsewhere. In the end, his own muse takes its minimal, nocturnal shape, sending this song into gorgeous territory everyone else in the crew just quite can’t reach, except Laura — trilling, look at me…