One of the key ingredients to making a successful tribute album is to try evoking your love of the artist's original work, while keeping the focus on your own distinct personality, taste, and skill. In that sense, violinist
Regina Carter succeeds in both honoring legendary vocalist
Ella Fitzgerald and showcasing her virtuoso jazz talents on 2017's sophisticated
Ella: Accentuate the Positive. Her second album for Sony Masterworks and first attached to the Sony imprint OKeh Records,
Ella: Accentuate the Positive find the Detroit-born
Carter exploring songs strongly associated with
Fitzgerald. For longtime
Carter fans who have enjoyed her deeply personal, stylistically cross-pollinated albums like 2010's
Reverse Thread and 2014's Southern Comfort, this album will feel pleasingly familiar. Smartly, aside from the ebulliently rendered title track and several other time-tested favorites ("Dedicated to You," "Undecided"),
Carter has chosen a handful of songs
Fitzgerald recorded, but which aren't the most obvious picks from her catalog. Additionally, while
Fitzgerald's preferred style of playing straight-ahead swing is certainly in
Carter's wheelhouse, it is not the main stylistic focus here. Instead, we get a the title track featuring vocalist
Miche Braden reworked from vintage swing into an airy and brisk progressive fusion-influenced number that's more
Chick Corea than
Billy May. Similarly,
Carter transforms "All My Life" (originally recorded by
Fitzgerald and
Teddy Wilson in 1936) into a flowing, languid, '70s R&B-inflected ballad held down by
Xavier Davis' deft Fender Rhodes accompaniment. Elsewhere,
Carter achieves equally compelling results turning
Fitzgerald's already gorgeous and yearning 1960 ballad "Reach for Tomorrow" into her own dreamy midtempo soul anthem and utterly transforming '30s swing standard "Undecided" into an expansive, funky blues-fusion groover featuring vocalist
Carla Cook. That said, there are still plenty of hardcore acoustic jazz moments here, including an urbane and poignant reading of "Dedicated to You," featuring a jaw-droppingly beautiful solo turn by bassist
Chris Lightcap, not to mention one of
Carter's most vocal-like and heart-wrenching performances. She also keeps things nicely pared down for
Hoagy Carmichael's "Judy," played here as a lively yet intimate acoustic duet with guitarist
Marvin Sewell. As the title implies,
Ella: Accentuate the Positive is a tribute album imbued with
Carter's obvious love for
Fitzgerald, but which accents everything that makes the violinist such a compelling, distinctive performer in her own right. ~ Matt Collar