Hey reader! Yes, you! Are you lying down on the bed or a hammock or something? Are you at least sitting down? Wherever you are, I need you to be relaxed, be still. Keep your mind and your ears open. I am about to tell you about Soft Echoes by jazz crooner Sharada Shashidhar, which is best received when your full attention is on it. This way, you will fully receive all the treasures—all the beauty—this EP provides.
Okay, you don’t really need to lay down, but this release, like most jazz releases, requires you to put away your distractions and take in the lyrics, the arrangements, and the way the project is explosively joyful, way-out trippy, and a full-on adventure. It is always, as they say, a vibe. Soft Echoes sounds like a sweet and psychedelic swirl of smooth jazz and Bossanova that isn’t afraid to have its occasional moment of going off the rails when it wants to. In the middle of the action is singer Shashidhar, whose delicate voice is like someone marveling at or meditating on the splendor of what’s presented.
The EP begins with “Soft Echoes,” the song, which opens with dreamy piano arrangements. Except when using such words, it refers not to daydreams, but something akin to being swept up into a different end of Oz like you are the project’s Dorothy. No tornado necessary. To accompany this piano is Sharada’s poetic lyricism. “Soft echoes of yesterday sound like today / Peaceful and tucked away,” she softly sings. “Heightened, aware / Seeing, holding / I’m in love with everything.” This music is not just for living in the now, but to play when you are busy appreciating that there is a now to celebrate. This is where all sensitivities are appreciated and harnessed as evidence of such life.
Continuing the Wizard of Oz metaphor, “By the Land,” the first single, is the sound of landing anywhere near Kansas, but in a way where you would be okay if you never really return. Vibraphones, a 5/4 time signature rhythm, rumbling low end of the bass, and occasional glaze of synth pads… and Shashidhar singing about connection and love being an important component to living upon earth amongst others. Not quite like a manifesto, but a slightly faulty transmission from a futuristic heaven sending you the meaning of life through radio static.
Then, the strong wind setting the beautifully chaotic nature of “Canyon Song” blows in, and you have nowhere else to run. The intense rain of jazz drums, expressive saxophones, and accompanying keys all swirl like twisters around the harmonizing of Shashidhar. In every dream, there is a moment where things start to shake up without notice, and “Canyon Song” is that track. Such extreme level doesn’t last too long before going right back to the dewy downtempo waltz of “Luckiest.”
While the music may not hint at anything particularly dark, the lyrics of “New Echoes” suggest otherwise. “It’s so loud inside,” sings Shashidhar tenderly, if not observantly. “The mental spheres of judgment shouting stories of things that can’t be true.” What was once a pleasant dream slowly turns into something almost nightmarish in scope. Before you know it, such travel through the dark ends with a slow waking up of the mind. You’re back to where you were before.
Soft Echoes feels like one big survey of the surreal. It twists, it turns, it soothes, it shakes. At the end of it all, you gather what it is to truly live from the point of view of both the spectator and recipient of “the message,” and all you did was hear a record of well-composed jazz.
