This album has two faces: a Turkish face and an American face. It is not that strange when you know that it is an album by Karsu Dönmez, an Amsterdam jazz singer with Turkish roots. It seems as if the three Turkish songs suit Karsu much better. Remarkable, because those songs hardly differ from her English songs: the same musicians, the same instrumentation, the same silky soft voice. Yet it is
… precisely the Turkish songs that sparkle. That is strange, because the Turkish songs are covers and the English songs are own material. When she sings in English, Karsu doesn't really stand out. There are already so many other jazz vocalists who sound something like this, although it pleads for Dönmez that she writes her own material and is not just another singer who takes the American Songbook over again. Confession is a nice album, but it does raise a nagging question: how could an entire Turkish-language album sound? (PdK)more