Lorraine Feather - The Green World

(Relarion, 2025)

Mike Healey

Lorraine Feather is a whisper from the past, manifested as a song in the present and, hopefully, the future. The Green World celebrates the vocalist/lyricist’s 25 years as an independent recording artist. Feather’s art bears a ferocious sense of humor and justice, in that order. In concert with her longtime collaborator, Eddie Arkin, Feather creates devilishly intelligent compositions addressing the sacred, mundane, and everything in between.

The singer/songwriter has an impressive circle of friends with whom she works on the recording. Keyboardists Shelly Berg, and Russell Ferrante, bassists Michael Valerio and Chuck Bergeron, drummer Ray Brinker; guitarists Arkin and Grant Geissman, violinist Charlie Bisharat, and cellist Jacob Braun all contribute significantly to the recording. And, it is not only Arkin providing the music. Shelly Berg, Russell Ferrante, Michael Valerio, and Arturo O’Farrill contribute compositions and arrangements.

As with all of Feather’s releases, The Green World’s charms are many. The title cut introduces the album with an anxious vision ripped from the World-Wide-Web miasma, fueled by the corrosive shredding from Grant Geissman’s guitar and the sinister squeals from Charlie Bisharat’s fiddle, and scored by Arkin. And then, there are the lyrics, phrasing, and voice of Lorraine Feather:

“When the music on the stream
begins a waking dream
And the sound we hear is less than melodious,
When the content we see on the smart TV
Seems craven, and shabby, and odious,
We drive all night,
Wake up to a softer light,
In the green world.”

Well, that is certainly taking the pulse of the discontent. But the singer and her cadre carefully layers this pulse within a bed of often subversive and always provocative music performed and arranged by her friends and colleagues.

Picking a superb center for the recording, “Canoe” presents itself as a literal telling of an experience Feather has with a loquacious cabdriver. But from this take-off point, the song blooms into a legion of metaphors and allegories just waiting to be unpacked by the listener. Now, picture an entire collection of such songs and therein is the charm of Lorraine Feather.

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Discogaphy

• Joanne Grauer Introducing Lorraine Feather (MPS, 1978)

• Sweet Lorraine (Concord Jazz, 1978)

• The Body Remembers (Bean Bag, 1996)

• New York City Drag (Rhombus, 2000)

• Such Sweet Thunder (Sanctuary, 2003)

• Cafe Society (Sanctuary, 2003)

• Dooji Wooji (Sanctuary, 2005)

• Language (Jazzed Media, 2008)

• Ages (Jazzed Media, 2010)

• Tales of the Unusual (Jazzed Media, 2012)

• Attachments (Jazzed Media, 2013)

• Flirting with Disaster (Jazzed Media, 2015)

• Math Camp (Relarion, 2018)

• My Own Particular Life (Relarion, 2021)

• The Green World (Relarion, 2025)