To define an album like “To Everything A Season” one simple word is enough: “touching”. Yes, because Jamie Doe talks about himself by exposing weaknesses and feelings that everyone can easily identify with: “I write songs that help me understand the world and my place in it. Now I know that writing songs has a strong social function. Writing songs helps me and, if they work, they help other people too” (statement taken from an interview given to the English press).
Released by a small French label, La Buissonne, the album is the result of mixed emotions. The birth of a daughter and the death of the father placed the author in front of a strong emotional dilemma. Amazement and melancholy are the two moods that coexist with naturalness and poetic intensity in the ten songs of “To Everything A Season”. The production of the album is in the hands of his friend Fred Thomas (recently author of an excellent album for Ecm in trio with Alice Zawadzki and Misha Mullov-Abbado), pianist and composer who introduced Jamie to the joys of jazz music, a presence which offers the album further solidity and compactness of ideas.
Cultured and refined, the songs of The Magic Lantern juggle between waltz-like piano tempos (“Trembling”), minimal-jazz phrasings (“Loops”) and twirling baroque arias that open up to chaos (“Data Points”), in the four or five minutes of each of the tracks the musician inserts an infinite series of instrumental elements (trumpet, sax, keyboards and flugelhorn) which undermine its elegant romanticism. Tighter and colder jazz rhythms characterize one of the most complex and daring pages of the album (“Love's A Tailor”), harmonic counterpoints and apparently unrelated chords combine for a sublime neoclassical-jazz expression (“Home”), while unusual tonalities and rhythmic tempos seek the perfect connection in the poignant “Hear Me”, where singing becomes a further instrument of an explosion of almost free-jazz harmonies.
With “Two In One” Jamie allows himself a moment of intense romanticism, declaring all his love for his wife with a soul-soaked melody, expertly enriched by a splendid horn section, the result is valuable and offers unusual references to the last rehearsals by Joan As Police Woman.
“Sweetheart” is also the result of the artist's sentimental bond, but the theme is not romantic and joyful: Jamie urges his wife not to take on any serious illness that could strike him and make him incapacitated, a real and burning theme, treated with grace and poetry. In “To Everything A Season” everything seems to have a cyclical nature, the quotes that Jamie Doe includes in the lyrics are spiritual in a different way (John Coltrane and the Bible), the sounds are a continuous alternation of melodies and counterpoints, life and death are mirror moments that they feed each other; in the same way the songs alternate love and loneliness, suffering and comfort, pain and peace.
The new album by The Magic Lantern is the piece that was missing to complete the list of the best albums of the year and Jamie Doe is the new hero of contemporary songwriting. You will hardly be able to do without these songs and the thirst for knowledge will soon force you to investigate the Australian musician's past.
Antonio Santini for SANREMO.FM
