Keiko Matsui: Moyo  [25 April 2007]  By Jon Ross  The first
track from Keiko Matsui’s latest smooth jazz release starts with
an accelerando hand drum rhythm. Next comes a funky piano vamp,
echoed by an electric bass. Enter vocalizations. Cut to sweeping
saccharine piano, then back to the vamp. Here’s a bridge of some
sort: a piano mini-melody echoed by more voices. Disparate
musics? Voices? What is going on? In a word, everything. Within
the first two minutes of “Moyo”, African percussion blends with
funk blends with jazz. Matsui’s classical athleticism—which can
be heard in how she executes her trills and adds a shimmering
quality to her lines—is at the center of this amalgam of sound,
an aesthetic that, as the CD gets deeper into the tracks,
becomes increasingly directed by synthesizers and other
electronics.  To take this as a disadvantage—the schizophrenia
of the music, the tendency to pack too much into a three-minute
space—would be wrong. Matsui shrouds herself in layers of
instrumentation, content to e