Secondly, this is the fundamental decision Creed Taylor - the owner and main producer of CTI - as regards the sound concept all CTI / Kudu Soul productions are sound technically nothing other than bone dry blues recordings, very directly, so straight and recorded without any reverb, simultaneously but involved in an almost reveling scale strings bed that can oscillate between sheer elegance and quietschesüß, therefore a strange contrast of two almost diametrically opposed Sound Concepts. You have to like - one was it too sweet to dry the other, together .... strange - and yet groovy in a strange way.
From A Whisper in 1972 her first recording for Kudu, the Soul-sub label from CTI - and the place so right for her to stuff, only the best and finest of musicians is because shopped to the studio: the knobs sitting incarnate James Brown sound-head - Pee Wee Ellis. Drums and Percussion served by Bernard Purdie and Airto Moreira, the guitars of Eric Gale and Cornell Dupree - melt away for the organ and the eingestzten pianos hanhabt Richard Tee, the alto-sax Hank Crawford and - here it comes - the Tenosaxophon plays a certain David Leibman .... what is simply a clerical error, because the man is Liebman, was previously among other things one of Wayne Shorter's successor at Miles Davis and is the one at the beginning of the eighties, which further carries the torch Coltrane. What a cast, what might have come of it ...
... Not too much with insufficient song! Here's hooked plain and simple. It is somewhat undecided between blues and soul songs lurched back and forth and has then decided to almost complete Soulset, thereby 'moved the group sound and the voice of Esther Phillips in the foreground, well .... Unfortunately, it was overlooked that the songs of Allen Toussaint, Isbell / Floyd, Gaye / Gaye, even only partially represent Gil Scott-Heron top products in Soul-songwriting art - or you could have more out of it. They all go under in a quite a unit sound and arrangement concept. With the exception of Tim Drummond songs, previously the songwriter of the now legendary Mother Earth - To Lay Down Beside You - which is staged as a blues song in R'n'B mode.
And that makes it clear that the decision in favor of the soul and against the Blues was the wrong - the four bonus tracks that were not used in 1972 for the original LP, prove this: Here it is, except for a Carole King Songs to three Blue trophies, including the Leonard Feather classic How Blue Can You Get, both surmounted in its overall sound and in the instrumental parts, because here are "Leibman" .... not the blues Coltrane - on but Crawford's his Old the Cannonball, but how! The same is true for Do not Run To Him Craig Lockhart, who must remain the slow blues, which he happens to be, and probably Cornell Dupree, but surely I am with a wonderfully dreamy guitar solo by me there .... not , And a superb A Beautiful Frienship closes in blues mode from the whole ....
That it for recording but then - with me - enough to five stars, the blues tracks of first-class blues singer Esther Phillips is clearly due, otherwise that's a shot in self-discovery stage, which never for them however in its Kudu years really ended, as shown in the following still stylistically lurching recordings - and since then is also Disco added.
