Will Todd: Passion Music, Jazz Missa Brevis – Shaneeka Simon

   in Choir & Organ (Mar, 2019)
Jazz and liturgical music have long and fruitfully worked together: one thinks of Duke Ellington’s Sacred Concerts, Mary Lou Williams’s Masses and works by Leonard Bernstein and Dave Brubeck. Todd is a natural and very confident successor, who wisely avoids the practice of putting ‘operatic’ voices into jazz contexts. Shaneeka Simon would sound just as confident singing Broadway material and the St Martin’s Voices, for whom Passion Music was written, deliver the familiar words – John 3:16, 13:34, 15:13, the Stabat Mater, the Seven Last Words and the Mass texts themselves – with what can only be described as relaxed reverence. John Turville’s easy but disciplined swing is also an …