Julie Tippetts - Shadow puppeteer 2000

Perhaps this is the work of a lifetime spent in front of a microphone. Perhaps it is merely another stopping place on the journey, or a report from the outlands and there will be more. But whatever it is, Shadow Puppeteer is the final step into the open for Julie Tippetts. After 30 years in the business and over 25 with her husband and collaborator, Keith, she has stepped out into the open completely naked (solo -- all instruments and voices were hers) and created a dream work for the ages. Shadow Puppeteer is a concept work in that there is a narrative that is revealed inside the improvisations and compositions. The protagonist is Esha, the woman observed, sung about, and spoken through. Tippetts took three years to unfold her story, using a friend's eight-track studio to record every temple bell, drum, recorder, and of course, vocal, in stack upon stack until the project revealed itself. Tippetts uses her voice in ways that are not usually associated with the human voice. Though she sings beautifully, her fierce, pioneering vocal techniques, all of them based on improvisations, point here toward composition, a shaping of sound and reaction to it that is poetic, deep, multi-dimensional, and metalinguistic. This is a language story without words, only utterances and created speech that communicate from both the center of the body and the heart. This story of Esha is a story of heart and trial and transcendence. It is revealed experientially through Tippetts living the work as she records it. It comes out of the speakers whole, raw, full of edges and angles, and somehow perfectly formed. These sounds, then, are indeed those of the human voice and its delineations inside one being as it attempts to communicate with a host of others in song. Shadow Puppeteer illustrates in striking unspeakable beauty, with the tenderness of the wolves, the blinding darkness that is the essence of the creative process. AMG.

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Julie Tippetts - Sunset Glow 1975

After leaving Brian Auger's band and becoming the musical and life partner of pianist/composer Keith Tippett, Julie Tippetts issued Sunset Glow, her first solo recording, in 1974 on the Polydor label. After her soul, pop, and R&B beginnings, Tippetts redeveloped her voice, taking it and her music in a different direction. She began to extend its reach in improvisation, breath control, and uncommon phrasing. She is one of the most compelling and original singers in recorded music's history. Sunset Glow is a curious recording, one that walks the razor's edge of composition and improvisation. Fans of Robert Wyatt's earlier solo records, Ruth Is Stranger Than Richard and Rock Bottom, will appreciate its strange song structures, varying dynamics, and knockout lineup -- Tippetts sings, plays piano, acoustic guitar, and percussion, and she is backed by a host of luminaries from the Canterbury Scene: Brian Godding, guitars; Keith Tippett, piano, harmonium; Mark Charig, cornet, tenor horn; Elton Dean, alto saxophone; Nick Evans, trombone; Brian Belshaw, bass; Harry Miller, bass; as well as African drum master Louis Moholo.

The set begins innocently enough with "Mind of a Child," a fairly straight-ahead Baroque pop song with a lilting piano line accompanying Tippetts' plaintive singing. But even here, with the channel-shifting production and suspended chords, Keith Tippett's harmonium providing a baseboard for everything, and the slightly off-kilter horns winding in and out of the backdrop, this is anything but a pop song. From here on it's almost anything goes, as "Oceans and Sky" brings jazz, free improv, prog rock, and blues to bear in a dynamite soaring wail of a tune that was virtually unlike anything else at the time. She pierces the sky with her improvising, opening her voice up with the heaviness and swallowing it whole. Many have criticized the simple lyric lines Tippetts wrote for these songs, but this is philistinism; her lyrics fit these melodies better than anything else could. They adorn simply, speak plainly, and offer the heart of the matter in each case. In that sense, they are truly poetic. If the production styles sound rooted in the '70s, it's all for the better. It's hard to imagine anyone making a record like this today -- because this is a singular achievement in any era. The set ends with "Behind the Eyes (For a Friend, R)," which listeners can safely assume is about Robert Wyatt, whose accident took place a bit before the album was recorded. Its stark, simple, shimmering glissando piano walks a simple line under the moaning, imploring, almost chant-like voice of Tippetts. It's a moving track that closes as fine a debut as one is likely to hear. AMG.

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