Arise marks the return of singer Zara McFarlane to the British jazz scene. With her third album, she takes ample opportunity to explore her British-Jamaican identity. She has followed London's Tomorrow's Warriors program for young jazz musicians together with producer and drummer . For Arise they shared their Caribbean roots. It is a product of the intersection of jazz and Jamaican rhythms such as
… reggae, kumina, calypso and nyabinghi. In practice, this boils down to floaty, dreamy, tropical music that often ripples along wonderfully relaxed, but here and there works towards a driven climax. McFarlane's voice is somewhere between 's crisp vocals and 's adventurous experiment. This makes Arise one of the most original vocal jazz albums of 2017. (AD)more
