Summer Days By Barbara Graff

 

Summer Days

By

Barbara Graff

Written by

Steve Sheppard

 

I still have fond memories of the last time I bathed in a Barbara Graff sonic lake of piano based music, that was back in 2020 and an album called Secret Beach, and that was a very pleasant experience indeed, today I get to travel once more with the artist on her latest collection of great songs called, Summer Days.

The track opens with a rare treat, a vocal moment of crafted singing on the opening piece called Summer Days; the final offering is an instrumental version of this very classy track. Graff’s voice manifests a clever climb, ascent and decline until the gentle coda is reach on a composition that was beautifully arranged, and as such a fine start to the release it was indeed.

When there is a rare cloudy day here in my country (Cyprus), it is cause for celebration; it is such a unusual occurrence, however the piece called Cloudy Day does reminded me of the country of my birth in England, where the opposite could be said, this slow and almost melancholy offering is akin to the sadness one felt then, when one wanted desperately to enjoy a sunny day at the beach, but instead it would be board games indoors. This is a reverie of those days, when grey skies ruled, as the sun had been banished.

The most intriguing piece off the album in my view was the almost classical motifs of the track Beach Mystique. The mists of the morning have cleared, and an opening through the monolithic cliffs ahead has appeared, showing a pathway to a sandy beach so magical. For me Graff captures this perfectly with her arrangement, one that floats from major to minor with ease, and teasing narrative after narrative as it goes, this is indeed my personal favourite from the album.

Only yesterday I watched with glee as beautiful creatures fluttered around my lemon tree, those insects are the subject of this song, and called Butterflies, an absolutely beautiful composition awaits the listener here, filled full of colour and hope, whilst the piece that is in fact our penultimate offering, floats into view, and quite wonderfully named Lake Oasis, this is a wondrous spectacle to behold, a more charming piano based narrative you would not find if you searched a hundred years.

As I stated earlier on in the review the concluding track in an instrumental version of the opening piece Summer Days, this quite craft-fully brings our journey to an end. It is harder than most people think to produce a summer based album, unlike all the other seasons where there is much more to work with, but Graff has done herself proud and has manifested something quite redolent of the subject matter for us all to enjoy, as we head into the warmest of days still yet to come and reach for a cooling cocktail.

I think Barbara should be proud of her efforts here; every song has a charming fluency to it, and each has its own story to tell, and as such there can only be one out come for Summer Days by Barbara Graff, and that will be a most pleasing sun kissed chart hit for the artist.