Anita Baker in Studio For Possible 2010 Release
Smooth Jazz songstress Anita Baker hasn’t released any new material since 2004’s “My Everything”. But now we’re hearing that’s she quietly been in the studio, preparing for a CD that could be released as early as next Spring.
Will that date happen for sure? Baker herself is coy, telling Billboard, “The record company wants next spring, and I would love for that to happen,” she says. “That would be lovely, but we all are mindful of the fact that we want it to be right. So when they say Spring, they really are planning for the Fall. It’s like, I’m a mom. If we want to be at brunch at 1, I have to tell my kids 12 o’clock, you know what I mean?”
As for the new music itself, Baker says there are “a couple of songs that I had in mind for a couple of artists that I think I’m going to use for myself.” She adds that the new music is “not a departure. It will be an Anita Baker record, but it will have a lot of surprising elements in it. We’ll take a lot of our contemporaries and bring them into my project where they may fit.”
One of the surprises is the presence of rapper Snoop Dogg. Baker is working with Snoop on an adaptation of Curtis Mayfield’s “Give Me Your Love (Love Song)” from the “Superfly” soundtrack. “We do it in a very contemporary way, a very grown-up way,” Baker says. “It’s lovely. Who knew that Snoop is madly in love with his wife, you know? We’ve got a chance to see that in the way his music has grown, so when he comes in to do dialogue over that love theme, it becomes very grown-up and contemporary at the same time.”
The upcoming album (her seventh studio record) will be distributed by legendary jazz label Blue Note records.