Lizz Wright, "Dreaming Wide Awake" (Verve): The producer Craig Street worked wonders with Cassandra Wilson, and in the twenty-something Wright he has found another ready-to-emerge diva.
(Chinen) LIZZ WRIGHT (Wednesday and Thursday) Ms. Wright's soulful alto has emerged as one of jazz's most welcome new timbres; this engagement celebrates the release of her fine sophomore album "Dreaming Wide Awake" (Verve).
This week will also see several notable jazz releases: Eddie Palmieri's "Listen Here!" (Concord), Lizz Wright's "Dreaming Wide Awake" (Verve), the Wayne Shorter Quartet's live album "Breaking the Sound Barrier" (Verve) and Harry Connick Jr.'s "Occasion: Connick on Piano 2" (Marsalis Music).
For her 2005 album, "Dreaming Wide Awake," she drew on the New York City scene that mingles songwriters and jazz musicians, working with the producer Craig Street (who has made albums with Cassandra Wilson, Meshell Ndegeocello and K. D. Lang) and the songwriter Toshi Reagon.
In her last record, "Dreaming Wide Awake," Ms. Wright's voice brought a concentrated, churchlike gravity to the folk-jazz musical settings of the material from here, there and everywhere.
In its blunt deglamorization of sexual license, it is more like the antidote to Stanley Kubrick's elegant, fearful erotic dream, "Eyes Wide Shut".
I turned on Glenoaks Boulevard, and it seemed like a picture of the immigrant's California dream: a wide boulevard lined with small apartment houses with big lawns and tall, thin palms.
But as to motivation, you don't think low land costs and the dream of wide open spaces have more to do with emigration than alleged Euro "serfdom?" C'mon dude, get off your high horse.
We want people to feel like they dream eyes wide open, share a collective mirage.
With a few florid exceptions — "Moonlight" being one of the less felicitous ones — "In Your Dreams" stays wide awake and earnestly direct.
