Jasmine Jordan’s Time Travel is a thing of beauty, past, present and future.
Patrick O’Heffernan
Jasmine Jordan does something with R&B and pop that is quite unusual. There is the familiar tempo and feel of R&B, but there is also a longing, a maturity, a personal connection and a heart to heart conversation that is rare to find and hard to accomplish. Jordan accomplishes it with what appears to be little effort. When you listen to her EP, Time Travel, you feel you know her with the kind of knowledge that you get from listening to a person talk while you read their face and body language.
Time Travel is her first EP, but is moves with the sophistication of a much more experienced artist. She knows exactly how to frame her songwriting and her smooth, precise voice so that, even coming through speakers or earbuds, she creates a relationship with her listeners. The result is a thing of beauty that travels through past, present and future.
Time Travel is a spare four songs, all about relationships in various states – some long ended in the past, some tentatively searching for a future, and some trying to cope with the here and now.
In the title song “Time Travel”, she asks wistfully, Lets go back in time/When you and I, were uncomplicated. We have all had that moment, wishing we could go back in time to a place where life was uncomplicated and Jordan captures that universal longing. But she is a pragmatist – she bring us back to reality in the chorus: “time travel ain’t possible”. And then she unreels the rest of the story with a beautiful alliterative line, “before I felt what I felt and we did what we did that night”, creating an impression of a passionate, loving union but then quickly erasing it in the second verse with the words, “before you took advantage of me”. As the slow, soft drum and light-touch keyboard notes paint a pastel backdrop for her voice, she introduces a new element, the artist Blanchard De Wave, rapping gently, a perfect male counterpoint to her confident, but longing melody.
In the song “Time Travel”, she uses gentle R&B with a tinge of romantic pop to tell us the past is past, she is wiser now, too strong to be taken advantage of. But she shifts the mood from confidence to doubt and the time from the past to the present in “Possibilities”. With a strong bassline, swirling keyboards and multilayered chorus she asks if she should go ahead, full of fear and excitement and start a new relationship. “I’m afraid to love again/Cause of what I’ve been through/But your patience and your perfect touch/Got me focused on you”. She nails it with an addictive hook, “And the Possibilities/Got you’re here with me” . I could listen to “Possibilities” all day long.
“Closer” is music in its own class. Framed with magical keyboard rifts, synths and gauzy guitar strums, but energized with very sophisticated baseline beats, Jordan uses her flexible voice to carry us over the line from R&B into romantic pop. The music matches the story, “Baby come closer/there’s no need to fear/Let’s just live and we’ll see” But, as she asks her partner to put away the fear, she reveals that she cannot do the same: “So scared of the what ifs/And will this lead to tears” But, despite the very human inner conflict, she is ready to go, to feel what she felt, to do what she did, but this time in control; she is doing the asking.
But no matter who does the asking, the final song, “Best I can”, warns us that the future of even the closest relationships is fraught. ”Best I Can” doesn’t cross the line from R&B into romantic pop, it erases it. With a sharp snare drum and complex tom patterns driving the chorus, “I’ve been loving you/The best I can”, Jordan tells her here and now partner that she can’t do any more, she is doing everything she knows how to be the perfect lover. Her lament is carried up with swirling keys that add urgency, building her case almost to the level of anger, but not quite. ” You woke me up and you show me how to give/Selflessly/I gave all my love/But now that I’m giving my best it’s not enough” And once again, Blanchard De Wave answers her, this time with a firm, conversational rap, himself lamenting how they lost touch. The conversation between De Wave and Jordan fills out the lyrical story and widens the musical frame, making a powerful song even more interesting. Producer Andre de Santana navigates Jordan and De Wave smoothly through a shimmering wonderland of rifts, notes, echoes and overdubs.
Jordan relocated from her native Washington State to California for college and then to LA for the energy and creativity to follow her dream. It obviously was a great move. Time Travel is a thing of beauty for the present and a signal that Jasmine Jordan has a great future in front of her.
By Patrick O’Heffernan, Host Music FridayLive!
Time Travel by Jasmine Jordan
www.jasminejordanmusic.com
https://twitter.com/TheRealJasmineJ
Available at www.jasminejordanmusic.com or iTunes
4/5
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