MIKE DI LORENZO is a New York-based keyboardist and music producer with a penchant for smooth jazz and he boasts an mpressive CV. He’s worked with a wide range of performers, everyone, it seems from Chuck Berry to Whitney Houston!
Mike records sporadically but has just released a new LP – ‘What We Need’. It’s the follow-up to his 2011 record ‘Bring it Back’ and the new 12 tracker is something of a departure for him: you see every track is a vocal. Here, helping Mike deliver are some big name from the contemporary worlds of smooth jazz and soul; people like R&B singer/songwriter Anna Moore, the UK’s Sonna Rele, jazz/soul singer Denise Stewart and Joel Kibble of the acapella group Take 6. Mike even finds space for rapper CaiNo.
The album’s title track is a warm, soulful ballad featuring the svelte tones of Anna Moore. Ms Moore fronts five other cuts including a cool but still soulful cover of Loleatta Holloway’s ‘Runaway’. Other album highlights include smooth versions of the always tear-jerking ‘Guess Who I Saw Today’ (Denise Stewart at the mic and a scintillating Di Lorenzo piano solo) and that MOR mainstay ‘Girl Talk’ fronted by Sonna Rele. Joe Kibble leads on another standard, a lush version of ‘Time After Time’ while maybe the LP’s biggest surprises are covers of Charlie Puth and Selena Gomez’s ‘We Don’t Talk Anymore’ and DJ Snake and Justin Bieber’s ‘Let Me Love You’.
So, yes, a varied repertoire but given a unity by the smooth jazz and/or lush settings and Di Lorenzo’s keyboard mastery. Again, another album sourced for us by “Soul Strutter”, Mark Turner @ https://soulstrutter.blogspot.com/
