Chrisette Michele - I Am Review

Bottom-Line: My advice to Ms. Lewis: next time around, and no doubt there will be a next time, leave Mariah at home and bring your voice and personality to the musical table.

Who knew my 20-year old daughter had genuine taste in music!  But so it was from her that I first heard this new R&B diva with the voice forged from angel dust and frothing ocean water.  The songstress is 25-year old Chrisette Michele from Long Island New York, who released her first studio CD I Am, last June on Def Jam Records. 

And who knew Jay Z's Def Jam Record, long associated with the oft-times outlandish world of Hip-Hop, could nurture, let alone release Ms. Michele's soulful CD I Am, but here it is, and we are the better for it.  From the opening notes of track No. 1 Like A Dream, to the closing sweet notes of the last (untitled) bonus track, there is everything to love and nothing to loath about this album. 

Superbly engineered and produced, I Am pulls together the best of the genre and entertains without insult; the music is evocative and at times moving and reflective.  And Chrisette's (even her name speak beauty) is free to explore the full range of her dynamic, if not uniquely beautiful and quixotic voice, and we the listener are the treated to a rarefied talent in the process. 

I Am is a CD that I can listen to time and again and with each outing I hear something new to love.  Chrisette, whose vocal styling's begs comparisons to the likes of Jill Scott, Nina Simone, Erykah Badu, and Billie Holiday, has nonetheless put together an album that is stamped with her signature sound, a sound resonating with the fresh, sunny optimism of youth, but at the same time is wrapped in an old-school R&B sense and sensibility.