monoblogue music: “It’s Time” by Rose Ann Dimalanta Trio

I suppose It’s Time for me to do another music review. (See what I did there?)

However, I really shouldn’t make light of this serious effort by a musical veteran who spent nearly two decades in the business, building her brand to the point of having her very own fan club. And I can see why she had one, given a fairly sultry and smoky voice that goes well with some of the selections she wrote and placed on this album. It was an album which came about as those I review often do: songwriting ideas bounced off a friend who liked them and enlisted help in making them a reality.

Since I don’t consider myself to be either a fan or maven of the jazz genre she’s staked her position in, I have to grade Rose Ann’s trio on some of the things I found memorable in the album. Sometimes they aren’t so good, such as the bass line on the lead song Forever Day By Day that sounded just a little off somehow, the odd percussion runs on Latin Soul, or the cloying string session on Miles, the second single from an album that is actually nearly six months old as I review it.

But “It’s Time” has some good points going for it: the imaginative improvisation of 10 Miles To Empty, the intriguing lyrical turn in Happily’s Never After, or the dash of funk that made Mad Run an enjoyable tune, to name a few. Truly Love Someone counts in that regard as a duet, although I wasn’t quite sure if it were a statement in featuring another female singer.

Another interesting facet I’d not heard or thought of before was that of using voice as instrument: a unique and nonsensical chorus briefly comes into play on the otherwise instrumental (and aforementioned) Latin Soul as well as on Seven Days. Since these come into play toward the middle of the song and aren’t part of a lyric line, I count it as adding another instrument to the mix to go with the basic bass, drums, and keyboards on the album. (The rather unique cover features the names of the trio: Raymond McKinley is the bassist and Massimo Buonanno is the drummer as Dimalanta plays keyboards.)

If I were to categorize this one, though, it would be somewhere between the hard jazz of Dinner For One (at over seven minutes, it’s the longest track on the album) and the old “middle of the road” radio format that Measure Of A Man and That’s All could easily fit into. It’s not something I would listen to every day – I’m definitely a fish out of water when it comes to that style – but it’s well-done enough to be enjoyable to a certain segment of the population that’s simply not into current popular music and likes something with gravitas.

As I generally do, though, I’ll let you be the judge (via Spotify.) If you like it, then it’s time to add Rose Ann Dimalanta to your collection.