Soul-jazz combo the Marcus Bell Quartet invited Ember and Oak Sessions to record “A Tale of Winds” — bound for the band’s forthcoming album Coming Home.
The session took two days in a room with wooden walls and one treasured ribbon microphone. Pianist Marcus Bell wrote the song with her voice in mind: a slow 6/8 that leaves long open spaces for the vocal to wander through.
“She hears harmony the way horn players do,” Bell says. “First take, she found a line none of us had written. We kept it.” The track closes the quartet’s album, due next year, with strings arranged around that very first take.
Fans of the quartet’s late-night sound will feel at home; fans of her voice will hear it somewhere entirely new. Until Coming Home arrives, the new album From the Soul carries three songs in the same spirit.