Reviews of "Love & Faith"

By a renowned musician

Yayu Khoe's debut solo album "Love & Faith", continues the tradition of vocal musicians that understand the lyricism and the power of phrasing. Her voice expresses qualities of richness, depth, mellowness and a wide range of colorations rarely found. Her unmistakable seamless singing style and unique blend of materials, drawing from the jazz, folk, traditional and religious song repertoire on the subject of love and faith, explore some of the many ways that jazz reflects the multi-faceted cultures of America. Her singing demonstrates she has captured the best that the melting pot has to offer as well as drawing cultural elements from both east and west.

Yayu's performance in the album "Love & Faith" is a result of extensive training and professional performance experiences. Yayu is a dynamic classical trained vocalist with a four-octave range who sings in the classical-jazz cross-over style. Her soft sultry, clear fresh sound brings renewed vitality and energy to a grand tradition of musical innovation and virtuosity. Yayu's refined singing captures the delicate characteristic from her eastern cultural heritage and yet remains soulful, dramatically intense and passionate, grooving to the raw and powerful emotions she inherited from the African-American culture she grew up with. Her singing is firy to sweet, timeless and exciting. Her strength lies in her expressiveness, communicating deeply-felt emotions with her listeners. "Love & Faith" is a collection of standards and originals that highlight the extraordinary singing capabilities of this gifted artist. She blends Chinese popular, classical, jazz and blues to create an accessible and magnetic fusion of music and culture. Yayu will touch your heart and warm your soul.

In "Love & Faith", Yayu demonstrates a seldom-heard passion and expression full of poetry and love into different styles of music. Her beautiful voice with serene quality and unique talent captivates her audience whether if the song is a romantic jazzy standard, "Love is here to stay", "They can't take that away from me" by Gershwin or the heavenly traditional hymn "At the River" to the emotional "Precious Lord, Take my Hand", to the popular song of faith "Somebody Bigger Than You and I" with an intelligent recited monologue written by Lawrence Jones.

Yayu mesmerizes audiences with her sultry vocals and intense passion. She produces an array of beautiful sounds from the melodic soothing "Don't Take your Love from me" and "Black is the Color of My True Love's Hair" to the deeply passionate "Now that I have You", and the fiery hot "On a slow boat to China" and "For Once in my Life". Three Chinese popular tunes: "The Drunken Tango", "Unforgettable" and "Swear by the Moon" are sung here with a jazzy twist, creating a unique sound of east and west. These delicate melodies expressing motions of loneliness, abandonment and of love are set free here in an intoxicated fancy. This blend provides many mesmerizing moments for the sophisticated listener.

"Love & Faith" CD is seductively capable of providing an intense personal connection with all humanity whether be it an expression of love, of pain, of heartache, of loss, of happiness or of trust in faith. Yayu's expressive singing and John Motley's intelligent arrangements of music unite elements of human emotions, music, and rhythms with elegance and refinement. This album clearly exhibites an exceptional virtuoso vocalist/performer supported by some of the industry's finest and respected musicians: John Loehrke on bass, Warren Smith on drums and Cecil Bridgewater on trumpet.

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