Recording Review:Cheryl Keyes’ ‘Let Me Take You There’ –A Quiet Storm Revisited

Let Me Take You There
Published/distributed: Los Angeles:Keycan Records,© 2008
Publisher number:88450104256
Performer: Cheryl Keyes
Archive Call Number: ARCD 7175

SEE ALSO EARcast no. 1:An Interview with Cheryl Keyes

In 1975,Smokey Robinson released an elegiac album and song entitled “A Quiet Storm” that became the basis for a new radio format by that name and which in turn influenced the development of a number of later styles of African American music such as smooth jazz and neo-soul. Targeted to a largely black,urban and adult audience,Quiet Storm music tends towards lush orchestrations,slower tempos,intimate themes,and impassioned yet restrained performances from instrumentalists and vocal stylists who draw from rhythm and blues,gospel,soul and jazz. Typically programmed in late-night time slots,these formats still thrive at a number of local and college-oriented radio stations in urban pockets across the country. The music appeals as much to lovers as to quiet evenings of personal reflection and welcome solitude,tends to be more sensual than sexual and is often as spiritual as it is soothing.

Let Me Take You There,the multifaceted debut CD by composer,vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Cheryl Keyes,is more than simply an homage to Quiet Storm aesthetics,although it may be that as well since Keyes,a professor in ethnomusicology at UCLA,is an accomplished historian of African American music. Let Me Take You There certainly succeeds as the touchstone for a number of strains in African American music broadly interpreted to take in the eclectic mix of hybrid styles that issue forth from the Black Atlantic,a rich heritage that Keyes acknowledges in the Latin-influenced “Seven Wonders of the World” and “Hyacinth.” On the other hand,in its overall scope Let Me Take You There may be one of the more accomplished contemporary renderings of everything that made Quiet Storm programming an understated though defining musical revolution,one that has perhaps been relatively understudied in black music scholarship. At a moment when most African American popular music is hip hop driven,Keyes’ CD contains no such influences,which may be somewhat ironic since she is a scholar of hip hop music and culture. Then again,everybody’s “old school” is different;Keyes’ old school begins in another era altogether. Certainly the importance of a recording like Keyes’ is that it perhaps illustrates the fact that there is probably a great diversity of black music production that is not being heard over the din of hip hop programming,which has perhaps also skewed record company budgets for signing new artists. Quiet Storm programming has always been more or less an alternative to what was happening in the commercial mainstream.

Quiet Storm programming began in Washington,D.C.,with the late Melvin Lindsey,who began hosting a late-night show in 1976 for WHUR-FM,a radio station affiliated with Howard University. The music that became identified with the show and others like it over the years included artists as varied as Grover Washington,Jr.,Phyllis Hyman,Frankie Beverly,Teena Marie,Norman Connors,Ramsey Lewis,Jon Lucien,Angela Bofill,Marvin Gaye,George Benson,Patti Labelle and Luther Vandross. In more recent years,neo-soul and smooth jazz performers whose music embraces the Quiet Storm aesthetic range from Brian McKnight,D’Angelo,Erykah Badu and Maxwell to Lauryn Hill,Joss Stone,Jill Scott,John Legend,and Gerald Albright. Many of these performers owe their careers to the format because they were played there before they were played anywhere else.
Keyes composed,arranged and orchestrated all of the music for the CD’s ten tracks in addition to writing most of the lyrical content,demonstrating an articulate command of the full range of black music idioms from jazz and gospel to soul and funk. The album opens,appropriately perhaps,with Keyes handling the bass line with a Moog synthesizer for the mid-tempo funk jam “I’m Feeling Down,”recreating a sound that seemed ubiquitous in the seventies as these instruments were increasingly incorporated into styles of black popular music.

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Audio example 1:“I’m Feeling Down”

Perhaps the most whimsical piece on the CD,and one of the most startlingly beautiful,is the melancholic “My Fantasy,”a lament of unrequited love that broods in delicate string and wind arrangements and pianistic flourishes that take on a cinematic sweep. Keyes’ vocal performance reveals a rather astonishing upper-register dexterity that is surprising considering her skill at working a gutbucket blues on the low end. The breathtaking operatic plateaus she achieves on the chorus ending with the plaintive refrain Oh why couldn’t he turn out to be/A friend for me reality or could it be my fantasy?,recalls Sarah Vaughan’s poignant excursions into heartbreak. Keyes’ consummate musicianship not undeservedly invites other comparisons to Vaughan that bear out on repeated listenings.

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Audio example 2:“My Fantasy”

“Hyacinth,” a tribute to Keyes’ mother,recalls the fact that Quiet Storm music provided one of the earliest showcases for the instrumental music now labeled smooth jazz,a contemporary style that has perhaps also been understudied by jazz scholars. The fact that it is essentially rhythm and blues-based music probably accounts for this slight,which of course overlooks the fact that the quality of improvisation that is its most essential element is what separates that which is good from what is merely schlock. In this regard Keyes,a seasoned jazz performer,demonstrates consummate skill and virtuosity on both flute and piano,employing multi-tracking to perform the illusion of accompanying herself. The vocal performance reminds one of the joyous flights of improvisational fancy that Dianne Reeves has made her signature.

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Audio example 3:“Hyacinth”

“Moondays (A Tribute to Lady Day)” calls up a smoky gin joint somewhere in some American city where in the wee hours of any given morning Billie Holiday might have graced a microphone. Keyes is evocative on her vocals but wisely does not attempt to mimic Holiday’s style. Instead she finds simpatico and communion in the context of the blues tradition using a trio setting with orchestral accents in the background. She takes it in the style of a torch song,vamping at the end and improvising vocal riffs that engage the full vocabulary of idiomatic techniques that any aspiring blues singer should have at the ready. Nancy Wilson once characterized herself as more of a vocal stylist than merely a jazz singer,a way to suggest that she sees no reason why she should accept categorical boundaries. “Moondays”suggests the same of Keyes.

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Audio example 4:“Moondays”

“Let Me Take You There” and “It’s Gonna Be Alright” both appear at the midpoint of the CD and reveal the kind of contemporary R&B songwriting sensibilities that have been a staple of African American-derived mainstream pop balladry since about the early 1980s. Neither would have been out of place on the trilogy of albums Michael Jackson and Quincy Jones collaborated on over that decade,and yet they have that timeless quality about them that romantic ballads tend to have. Of the two,“It’s Gonna Be Alright” probably better reveals Keyes’ sense of dramatic timing,using modulations,dynamic shifts,and vocal colorations to create tension that always finds reassuring resolution.  The gospel chorus at the end,a practice that mainstream pop performers began to incorporate into secular material in recent decades,reconnects black sacred and secular traditions that have always coexisted in a variety of musical contexts,and provides a satisfying sense of closure that is uplifting without overdoing the convention.

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Audio example 5:“It’s Gonna Be Alright”

Keyes ends the CD with what at first sounds like the most simple of love songs,introducing a descending melodic line on electric piano that forms the song’s recurring motif. The addition of flamenco sketches from an acoustic guitar pulls still more coloration from what has by now been a full palette of compositional techniques deployed with considerable craftsmanship. Like all of Keyes’ material,this song patiently reveals itself over time. Only after the final strains of its lyric have waned does one discover that it is deceptively something other than what it first appears.

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Audio example 6:“No One But You”

Popular music studies have probably given short shrift to African American music in those academic settings that bother to pay attention to popular music at all. Where such attention is given,it has largely tended to focus on classes in American popular music defined as rock ‘n’ roll that marginalize all but the most undeniable black progenitors of mainstream rock styles. Jazz has fared somewhat better and gospel has also made inroads over time,which nonetheless renders invisible a diverse range of African American musical styles and performers who perhaps only survive because we cannot help but to continually conjure them up whenever we lift a voice or instrument in song. If that is true,then Let Me Take You There does qualify as a kind of homage to everything that has come before it,demonstrating a stylistic range in its songwriting that is as commanding for its time as Ellington was in his own,and a knowing intimacy with those styles that suggests Keyes has studied the nuance of every singer who has ever mattered in American song. If it is true that you can’t go home again,it does not mean you cannot revisit it,if only in memory and in songs that have the power to conjure up the evidence of things unseen.

- Review by Miles White,Ph.D.