GUEST REVIEW..................................................................7 MARCH 2005
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Artist:
PRECIOUS BRYANT |
You can't help but feel slightly transgressive when listening to Precious Bryant’s first CD, Fool Me Good (2002). You feel as if you're eavesdropping on a private conversation. You hear quiet chatter at the beginnings and endings of a few tracks, songs often trail off in impromptu guitar licks, and a couple of songs begin so abruptly that you imagine someone surreptitiously started recording while Bryant wasn't looking. Of course, after listening to the entire CD you also get the impression Bryant is a born performer and that you might just have been pleasantly hoodwinked by a carefully crafted series of improvisations.
Some of the rawness and improvisational feel of the first CD has been replaced with a bit of polish on her second release, The Truth (2005), but at 63 years old, Bryant just seems to be hitting her performative stride. Her voice seems perpetually at-home, effortlessly comfortable and unhurried. As on Fool Me Good, the lyrics remain simple and the messages plain. Bryant presents herself first and foremost as a practitioner of the blues, and she never lets the lyrics get too far ahead of the musical aura they were intended to accentuate. The added polish on The Truth primarily derives from the accompaniment Bryant has added to her blues and R&B guitar. Her son Tony Bryant contributes on bass, J. D. Mark plays drums, and Jake Fussell and producer Amos Harvey jump in on three of the CD's fourteen tracks. The songs navigate familiar blues themes—religion, love, and infidelity—but as Harvey insightfully observes in his liner notes, Bryant has a unique ability to strike a balance between "the sacred and the secular."
Indeed, the most rewarding moments on the CD occur when Bryant discovers the overlaps among religion, love, and infidelity or when she successfully locates the intangibles of the sacred in secular situations. The title track provides one of the best examples of the latter. The ideal invoked in the CD's title carries the promise of spiritual enlightenment or religious conversion, but Bryant domesticates these abstractions in "The Truth" in which a woman gently (though we never doubt her sincerity) warns her man against the dangers of deceiving and mistreating her. Bryant leads us to enlightenment through a simple incantation: "That is why I like the truth." It's hard to disregard the veracity of that sentiment. Whether you lean secular or sacred, Bryant consistently reminds us that a simple preference for the truth underlies the cheatin' and intolerable mistreatin' she explores throughout the CD.
We also get a more playful look at infidelity in Bryant’s cover of "You Can Have My Husband"—you can probably guess the next line: "Please don’t mess with my man"—and "Dark Angel," Bryant’s tribute to the TV series of the same name, reminds us that she is writing music for her own entertainment as well and that the cancellation of the series marks its own kind of cruel betrayal. (Don’t overlook the "special thanks" to Jessica Alba in the liner notes.)
The Truth closes with a distinct note of departure. On either side of the felicitous instrumental "Sugar Hill Blues," Bryant offers up her interpretations of "Last Time" and "Good Night." We can only hope that it’s just another part of the performance when she sings, "This may be the last time" and "I hate to leave you but it’s time to go." I imagine she's got a few more songs up her sleeve, and I'll be anxiously anticipating their appearance on future CDs.
kw