One of the good things about having this website, is that from time to time artists contact me to tell me about their music just like Yolanda Charles did to introduce her project Mamayo.
If you are an eager reader of CD booklets and study carefully who played on a record, you’re certainly familiar with Yolanda Charles. She was featured as bass player on Carleen Anderson’s Blessed Burden, Misty Oldland’s Supernatural, Urban Species’ Listen album and also appeared on records by Aztec Camera, Robbie Williams or Paul Weller (but that’s hardly the music featured here, so you are forgiven if you don’t know about that, I didn’t know it myself before I had a look at Yolanda’s website).
Yolanda is not only a talented bass and guitar player. She can also write, arrange and produce good songs. Thanks to her previous session work she also knows some of the UK’s best singers and invited Carleen Anderson, Shaun Escoffery, Vanessa Freeman and Mandy Lecointe to join her to present an album “recorded today that has some of the qualities of old, where you can hear the people on those records, giving the songs real character and a place in time.”
The album’s opener is the programmatic Intro that sees the Liegeman rapping about this album (”It’s time to liberate yourself and feel free/Whether or not success is gauged commercially/ True success is in the end product musically/ And then u broke the chains which restrained it“). And then things start to become really good with the funk-rock of The Game featuring Carleen Anderson as singer. Carleen also sings on the warm and mellow soul song Born To Love, which just happenes to be one of the best songs Carleen has ever recorded.
Shaun Escoffery also captures us with a memorable performance on No Tomorrows. Although this beautiful ballad was written by Yolanda she actually isn’t playing on this song. Instead her husband Miles Bould can be heard on percussion, Scott Futh on guitar and Spencer Cozens on keys.
Shaun appears on Hey Hey as well and this time Yolanda’s irresistible bass play can also be heard.
Yolanda not only knows how to charm fine vocal performances out of Carleen and Shaun but also out of Vanessa Freeman. Just listen to Civilized with its horn section, that gives this funky groove a nice live feeling, or the midtempo soul of The Wheel, a great song that has all the right ingredients striking bass play, real drums, horns, warm keys and inspiring vocal input.
Last but not least there’s Mandy Lecointe on Waiting and Goodbye. Though Mandy has sung with Faithless, Urban Species, Artful Dodger and Lisa Stansfield, I haven’t heard of her before. I really like Mandy’s performance on Waiting, a song that reminds me of all the more or less obscure Brit soul songs from the early 90s from bands like Esperanto, Metropolis or Perception with an organic sound long before this term became fashionable. As a bonus there’s the hidden bonus track Fantasy that features Katie Kissoon on vocals.
All in all Yolanda has surpassed herself with this highly recommendable album and she’s really a musician, songwriter and producer to watch out for.

Tracklisting of The Game: 1. Intro/ 2. The Game/ 3. The Wheel/ 4. Hey Hey/ 5. Goodbye/ 6. These Times/ 7. No Compromise/ 8. Civilized/ 9. Waiting/ 10. No Tomorrows/ 11. Don’t Step In Time/ 12. Born To Love/ 13. You Heard It Right | released 2003 by Yolanda Charles

For more infos visit groove4dayz.com.

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