Stranger shores
Of course I’d seen Mishka Adams before, when she was only so high, probably just a toddler in her prairie dress, a yaya trailing in her folks’ art gallery in Pinaglabanan, San Juan in the mid ’80s during one of the “Chromatext” shows. Then again years later, in her sculptress mom’s digs in Blue Ridge, now by all means a grown woman shortly after the launch of her career as a jazz singer. She has an arm brace tattoo.
Through the mail or courier service her newly released albums on Candid arrive “God Bless the Child” and “Space”… and Mishka herself comes home around yearly for a regular break, after spending most of her time in a music and composition school in Britain. She learns the art of the jazz trade with the best of them, both pros and fledgling artists, in an environment of constant synergy.
“Stranger on the Shore” (Candid 2011) is her fourth album, the latest chapter of her continuing maturation as a musician, tapping the support of old friends and familiar faces like Ed “Koyang” Avenir, Ria Villena Osorio, Simon Tan, Tots Tolentino, Mar Dizon. The album is remarkable for being an experience in itself and reminds of what it was like listening to jazz for the first time.
Not Pinoy jazz, mind you, because even the writer-guitarist Aya Yuson would scoff at such term, but jazz pure and simple, with all its internationalist, borderless, freeform and improvisational connotations. That Mishka happens to be half Filipina is perhaps incidental to the proceedings, but then again the listener can’t help but indulge in a few flashbacks the old standards and chestnuts on “Stranger on the Shore” evoke.
On the surface the title cut tells the story of the girl left at the pier, hanggang pier lang, combining sentiments of distant shores (Chad and Jeremy) with the verve and court and spark (Joni Mitchell) of pirates (Ricki Lee Jones), holding the bag containing the music of all these three artists at the same time. But listen to it again and it becomes fairly clear what Mishka is trying to put across: to get to the heart of the matter one has to do away with all the trappings, well okay, short of wanting to destroy everything to see what’s left standing. It’s the age-old parable of the artist’s epiphany and the realization that, as a late dementor had said, one has to be alone with one’s art.
Another hard lesson learned by Mishka through the years of honing her craft: one has to get as far as possible from home in order to achieve some distance and objectivity. This too is evident in the two songs with the word “star” in them, Star Eyes and Star Dust. The first is a light jaunt, the singer detached yet teasing, the band behind her solid in their ensemble playing yet light as a feather. The other, the legendary Hoagy Carmichael tune, Mishka more than does justice to, affirming that there’s more than one way to render a brilliant song brilliantly. The arrangement by Villena Osorio has admirable restraint, allowing the song to seek its own level through which Mishka’s voice gives off variants of light like a strange thing in the sun (Cesar Ruiz).
The CD hasn’t turned the corner when the Joni Mitchell song Both Sides Now hovers into view, a paean to the previous generation, as it’s likely that her mom must have sung it in the old Butterfly restaurant off University Avenue in UP Diliman, the slightly wavering tremolo or is it vibrato a salute to one of the great singer songwriters of our time. No Judy Collins this but the take here helps redefine the song as a suite in itself of Mishka’s brown eyes. But are they really brown, or are the notes bouncing in the morning haze again affecting our normal sense of perception?
Naysayers and similar prophets of doom have made much of the so-called elitist nature of the jazz form, and perhaps they have yet again a beef or two in the foreign language numbers in the album, two in French Sous Le Ciel de Paris and Les Enfants Qui S’aiment and one in Portuguese, Beatriz. Well, the taskmaster might have another think coming especially in the heat of summer, as the songs blow like a cool breeze through the proceedings, or better, pour like spring water on the parched hearts of present-day jazz’s harmonics and melody. Isn’t it lovely that we’re reminded of a collector’s item cassette of many moons ago, Lani Hall’s A Brasileira, which even if we didn’t understand a word of, still had the capacity to disarm and enchant because the lyrics were like a mantra or oracle exclusive to her listeners?
Comes a time during the performance of any artist on stage that she makes eye contact with a listener, any haphazard listener in the audience likely on the verge of drunkenness or sublime intoxication, and a bond is formed that might not ever be broken. At least, not until several seconds after the last note is sung. This moment of connect or empathy may be heard several instances in this album, but none as manifest as in Dahil Sa Iyo, yup, the old Imeldific standard that might have us doing a double take back to the Marcos years. But here Mishka has a different approach and imbues the song with a parallel light, stripping it down to its bare basics to be the wondrously beautiful song that it is. It isn’t memory that the singer plays with like fire here, but the other way around through the sidelong glance of the fires of summer Mishka returns the song to itself, the singer alone and true because selfless.
