Time and Again is Isha’s first CD where she wrote more than half the songs, the other near half devoted to past influences and soundtracks of youth, from Tears for Fears to Go-Gos to Madonna and Billie Holiday to Peggy Lee, those album covers with the close-up face in reclining mode.
Much has been said of her cover I’ll be Seeing You, written by Holiday but signature song of Lee (according to accompanying press kit), which however way you hear it could be a perfect auld lang syne song, whether at finales for class reunions, funerals, or simply as the last song in the nearly empty videoke bar, when everyone’s too drunk to follow the bouncing ball or lighted up lyrics.
Cherish by Madonna paints varied colors of devotion and surrender, the piano playing almost becoming an acronym for the unnamable because inescapable. Her voice may strain a bit on the high notes, but this is in the tradition of the best singer-songwriters of the West, from Joni Mitchell to Sarah McLachlan to Rickie Lee Jones.
And right after the amusements provided by Head Over Heels and Everybody Wants to Rule the World, comes the meat of the matter of her original compositions.
There’s the instrumental 1992 and the song inspired by the characters in Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, in short the work of a very literary lady who just happens to be Muslim and play a hell of a piano.
The others seem to drift by while doing the morning chores, so light yet heady, run those by me again:
Lately I’ve Been Lonely, Tomas and Tereza, Ice skating. She certainly deserves a closer hear, and Isha has a gig at Stone House on E. Rodriguez on the Thursday after Eid al-Fitr, a stone’s throw from Balete Extension, and where perhaps she would be backed –as she is on the album – by bassist Simon Tan late of Wdouji.
An undoubtedly blessed child is Mishka Adams, her voice alone likely to launch a thousand ships, and we don’t mean through the David Gates of Babylon. Again Billie Holiday makes a cameo or was that her ghost in Mishka’s reading of the title cut, the beloved torch passed from one generation to the next.
Mishka writes a little less than half of the playlist, and we hear not only a budding songwriter, but a musician well aware of the scales and nuances of translating from the dark side of the soul. She can be Judy Garland too, as in Somewhere Over the Rainbow, the guitar reverb echoing the arc of seven colors.
Body and Soul ... just when we thought that no one could come close to the Manhattan Transfer version, comes Mishka on the microphone. Funny how we catch ourselves humming this song while driving in the city of broken roads.
Autumn Leaves with its French line as sung here like a dusted off intro, becomes unlike any of the versions we’ve heard so far, and a worthy counterpoint to Benny Goodman’s reading on clarinet on the Paris album.
As Mishka rather sheepishly admitted during the launch, "Where do we begin" has an unmistakable Fleetwood Mac feel to it at the outset, it’s only in the instrumental building up to the fadeout where Sammy Asuncion’s guitar seems to take all basis of comparison nonchalantly away.
Several veteran musicians play vital roles in the album, as Asuncion is joined by his fellow Pinikpikan members bassist Louie Talan (from the hibernating Razorback) and Dr. Sticks Barth, as well as another ex-Wdouji drummer Koko Bermejo, among other experts in self-effacement like guitarist Koyang Egay Avenir.
But the bunso Mishka more than holds her own in such elite company, aided in no small part by the anting-anting tattooed on her arm, on whose volition she had written perhaps the most personal jazz pop songs in recent memory, Mama’s Garden and Marrakech.
The first has to do with an unforgettable fire (U2), the other miles away from an old CS&N hit, Marrakesh Express written by Graham Nash.
Isha & Mishka, Mishka & Isha, two Filipinas on the same Candid label as Olga Konkova and Stacey Kent. All write-ups about being world class and such become mere lip service, because the other hemisphere and zones above and below are right here, in these lambent recordings of two muses themselves touched by the Muse.