Well, there's a nice surprise. Jill Scott was feared lost to music industry machinations, more likely to succeed in her acting career than make a fourth album (she's probably best known now to mainstream British audiences as Mma Ramotswe in The No 1 Ladies' Detective Agency TV series). But it seems a four-year musical hiatus and change of label has done her the power of good, as this is the Philadelphia singer and spoken-word artist's best album since her debut Who is Jill Scott?
It kicks off in fairly straightforward “nu soul” fashion, with “Blessed”, featuring the kind of I'm-a-strong-woman-and-isn't-life-great rhetoric that can be saccharine in lesser hands, but which Scott excels at, and the balmy mid-tempo disco of “So in Love” with Scott and Anthony Hamilton in full-tilt Roberta Flack and Donny Hathaway mode. All great, but it's when she shows her range and inventiveness that it really takes off.
Watch the video for "Shame" (and look out for the trampolining trombonists)
So “All Cried Out Redux” is a cabaret jazz number featuring just Scott's vocal acrobatics, a honky-tonk piano and human beatboxing by the legendary Doug E Fresh. “Some Other Time” features wry reminiscences over a rolling classic hip-hop beat and jazz guitar. The woozy multilayered voices of “Missing You” capture the confusion, envervation and nausea of rejection in startlingly uncomfortable form. In between these there are all manner of soul ballads of varying degrees of sauciness, and really the whole thing is just quite fantastic. In an era supposedly obsessed with youth, this is a mainstream artist aged 39 and operating at her creative and commercial peak. Like I said, a nice surprise.
