Roberta Flack — Chapter Two (50th Anniversary Edition)
Qobuz reissue review (July 2021)
Coming as it did on the heels of Roberta Flack’s groundbreaking First Take debut, and devoid of any iconic tracks like that set’s “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,” Chapter Two has long suffered from an undeserved lack of attention that’s made it seem like something of a sophomore slump in this legendary singer’s catalog. Nothing could be further from the truth. Chapter Two is one of the rawest and most effective demonstrations of Flack’s incomparable voice and her equally impressive taste in material and presentation. Opening with the defiantly and intensely sensual “Reverend Lee” — in which Flack deftly threads the needle between sacred and profane — Chapter Two immediately seeks to stake a claim beyond the more genteel and cosmopolitan approach of its predecessor.
If First Take was a soulful take on jazz vocals, Chapter Two sets out to explore the bluesier side of that style. Although it exists in a similarly lush milieu, with plenty of horn and string arrangements, Chapter Two is simultaneously more restrained and understated, with a sense of spacious atmospherics and liminal implications; both Flack’s voice and the accompanying instrumentation seem as attuned to the sound between the notes as they are to the expertly crafted harmonies and melodies in the foreground. Perhaps this is due to the upgrade in collaborators; those arrangements were all handled by William S. Fischer on First Take, but on Chapter Two, a team of four arrangers is on hand, with Eumir Deodato handling strings and horns, while Donny Hathaway (who also contributes piano) and co-producers King Curtis and Joel Dorn oversee the whole affair.
Even the most robustly constructed songs — a slow-galloping take on Jimmy Webb’s “Do What You Gotta Do,” an appropriately melodramatic version of “The Impossible Dream,” a gut-wrenchingly climatic interpretation of the Impressions’ “Gone Away” — have an almost ephemeral quality as the production manages to not so much “put you in the room with the performance” as it amplifies the ethereal collision of sophistication and soulfulness that gives these songs so much life. This warmly remastered 50th Anniversary Edition tacks on just one bonus track, but it’s a doozy: an incredible version of Joni Mitchell’s rejected theme for Midnight Cowboy, a song which is otherwise unreleased except for a version that Flack produced for soul singer Donal Leace’s 1972 Atlantic album. © Jason Ferguson/Qobuz
