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Andra Day Soars at Special Club Show at New York’s Legendary Blue Note: Concert Review
Andra Day previewed her new album 'Cassandra (Cherith)' during a stellar Monday night performance at New York's intimate Blue Note jazz club.
Over two sets at the intimate venue, Day and her stellar eight-piece band premiered many songs from her new album, “Cassandra (Cherith)” (named after her birth name and a Biblical allusion meaning “to cut away”), which drops on Friday and includes the first new music from her since the release of the soundtrack to “The United States vs. Billie Holiday,” the 2021 biopic for which she scored a best-actress Oscar nomination for her performance as the legendary titular jazz singer. Day and the musicians — guitar, bass, drums, two keyboards and three backing singers, somehow jammed onto the Blue Note’s small stage — were loose but tight like a great jazz/R&B band should be, taking flashy but unostentatious solos and incorporating other songs into her new ones. They opened with a medley of Holiday’s harrowing “Strange Fruit” and “Tigress & Tweed” from the film’s soundtrack; Erykah Badu’s “Bag Lady” got worked in with the new song “Narcos” (and we think we heard a snippet of Badu’s “On & On” slipped into one of the songs); “Nervous” incorporates a melody from Seals & Crofts’ “Summer Breeze”; “Where Do We Go From Here” has a whiff of D’Angelo’s “How Does It Feel?,” and they also included their innovative take on Nina Simone’s “Mississippi Goddam” (from the 2015 tribute album “Nina Revisited”) in between new tracks.
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