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Life Begins For Yaz Alexander
Yaz Alexander was a backing vocalist for Handsworth revolutionaries Steel Pulse and later for nineties pop-reggaeist Pato Banton. Life Begins -out on Fully Fledged Productions- is the debut album for this Birmingham-based singer – and it is a very classy reggae album indeed. A couple of tracks present Yaz as a sultry, cool, jazz diva or as a soul singer, with some excellent seventies stylings - do I also detect “Theme From ‘The Godfather’” in there? Of course, there is plenty of uplifting and very positive reggae, with denser arrangements than is usual - the attentive listener will hear jazz, soul, funk, rock and even blues influences – and lyric concerns range from Black pride, sisterhood and self-image to the tenderest of love songs.
Best of all, Yaz draws on Jamaican music from the sixties onwards, with a penchant for not only the roots sound of the seventies but perhaps more especially the classic sound of rocksteady, the first real singer’s style in Jamaica, popular between 1966 and 1968, and today sometimes overlooked (although this is definitely a contemporary release).
Yaz Alexander can certainly sing, and the mixture of live and computer backing works extremely well. Helping out are the likes of Peter Hunnigale and The Gumption Band, which gives some measure of the quality on offer here.
Sampler
