Turn Up the Quiet
Jonathan Karrant’s ‘Love Dance’ with Grammy-nominated Jane Monheit sets hearts on fire
Jonathan Karrant and Jane Monheit…. What an inspired, perfect match for a sensuous, moody, very adult contemporary “Love Dance.”
The Ivan Guimarães Lins remake dropped today (July 28, 2023), and also features the instrumental elements of an intimate ballad wrapped around lyrical jazz: sax (Houston Person), piano (Patrick Hogan), and the gentle upturn of rain-washed drum/cymbals-bass (Jeremy Klewicki, Nick Schmitt).
It is a song Grammy-nominated Monheit, 1998 Thelonious Monk Institute runner-up, knows and performs well, most memorably at the 2003 Jazz Open Stuttgart.
On both versions, she plays young, lithesome damsel, slow-burning into withering femme fatale — a discovery and art itself — lingering in all the soft spots, melting her voice to the tune’s lovely, irresistible wrap-around, letting the endings drift and flutter and wave goodbye. Her voice is pitch-perfect and as full-bodied as cognac in warm, loving hands.
The sweeping love song invites a duo-toned, duo-themed vocal pairing, along with the sax-piano underscore.
Karrant — a favorite in jazz circles and perhaps the best partner to an emotive powerhouse as singular as Monheit — makes the most of the breathy pauses, dips, and dives required of the Lins composition.
Their musical interactive courtship leaves a little different impression, deeper, stronger, more attuned to intense, modern focus.
His vocal prowess enriches and bridges the lyrical-musical, adult-contemporary-jazz-standard worlds with comfortable, experiential intimacy — as if he’s going back in time to re-live the best moments.
He wisely follows, trails, and mirrors her seductive lead — a willing, helplessly enamored partner…reacting in kind. The two instantly bond in real recording time, drawing curtains, lighting candles, and cooing sweet nothings to one another as if nobody else exists.
The mood is so private, so scintillating that the listener feels slightly voyeuristic, living vicariously through the vocalists’ intimate, musical exchange.
Let’s face it, “Love Dance” belongs in the bedroom as a prelude to the real thing, played in a push-pull tease, with “sweet touches” of class performed on superlative vocals that — quite often — don’t even need a band. Monheit and Karrant are their own vibe.
“Love Dance” could be almost too scintillating for the strait-laced types in the audience, when the slithery vocals sink into satiny sheets of ecstasy and slink away in a moaning hither…Karrant’s rich, low-throated voice — the bowed, enraptured bass — supporting Monheit’s upper registers, having their way — a willowy flame in horn and strings.
The sax interspersed throughout traces the melody, but give off interesting pockets of (former Delfonics’) Major Harris’s 1975 soul-sexy ballad “Love Won’t Let Me Wait.”
Look for a full album Sept. 8.
Oh yeah.