Stefano Pastor might be called an expressive mimic. While his primary focus is jazz, he has worked in classical and rock, giving him a broad stylistic knowledge from which to draw, as is evident in his playing on and conception for his CD, Songs.
The songs he chose for his second solo recording include jazz standards, a more outré nod to jazz classicism, a rock standard and a couple of Brazilian tunes. Pastor gives serious consideration to each piece, finding a unique sonic space for each one and then using multi-tracking, the occasional sample and his own vocals to craft each song. "I Got Rhythym" gets a surprisingly noisy treatment, almost as if to say at the outset that he can keep time but is just as willing to fall out of it. "Beatriz" and "Quem é você" are given soft, romantic readings with nearly (but not quite) incongruous bits of noise and drone running through them. Pastor steps softly again through "You Go to My Head" but this time in an almost paranoiac fashion, his voice low in the mix and surrounded by multiple violins.
Through much of the CD, Pastor has a warmly sawing tone in the tradition of Stuff Smith and Billy Bang. But playing Jimi Hendrix gives him a chance to put the fiddle to the metal. Forced through a fuzzbox, his violin returns a fantastic sound. The choice of "Purple Haze," however, doesn't help him to sell the idea. The song has been done so many times, and quite famously so by the Kronos Quartet, that it's hard to hear him through the history. And while his understated singing in Portuguese works surprisingly well on other tracks, his attempt at rock singing comes off as forced. Fortunately, he saves face with the album's closer, a contemplative and unadorned take on Charles Mingus's "Duke Ellington's Sounds of Love."
Pastor hits on five out of six cuts here, not at all a bad showing. Despite the rock misstep, Songs is an immensely likeable record.
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