
(Review
by Ann Alex)
Take hope all ye people
in ‘ordinary’ jobs. Carolyn Lee Jones,
raised in Nebraska ,
worked for many years in retail but never quite forgot her musical
ambitions. She became a full time jazz
singer and bandleader in 2008, and this is her second album, and a fine piece
of work it is. The CD insert describes
her as a ‘contralto’, not a term I’d use about a jazz singer. No, she’s a singer with a rich, flexible
range, expressing herself admirably in song.
The musicians are well skilled and play as appropriate for the
tune. For example in Lazy Afternoon there is a repeated buzzy
bee sound from the horns, and for The Island, a song about living with
your lover on a desert island, the flute solos like a humming bird.
The disc features jazz
standards East of The Sun; Nearness Of
You; Old Devil Moon; Never let Me Go; and several other standards such as Small Day Tomorrow (Fran
Landesman); The Performer; Creepin’ (Stevie Wonder); If You Were Shakespeare; I Wished On The Moon; Let’s Get Lost; Piano In
The Dark; Tell Me All About It; Lazy Afternoon; The Island.
I prefer the jazzier tracks
where the singer sounds more ‘at home’ but all the tracks are worth listening to,
including the relaxed tones of the horns on Small
Day Tomorrow (about a day off work); the pleasing bowed bass solo on East Of The Sun; the pulse beat of the
drum and the jazzy piano on If You Were
Shakespeare and the catchy Latin beat of Tell Me All About It.
The
CD is released on November 19 on the Cat’nround Sound label.
Ann
Alex
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