Every so often, an album arrives that feels less like a release and more like a quiet revelation. Moon Over Mildmay is exactly that - a record that sidles into your life with the intimacy of a late-night conversation and leaves you wondering how this voice has been hiding in plain sight.
Carr has been steadily shaping a reputation across London’s jazz rooms - Hoxton Hall, Vortex Jazz Club, the usual haunts - but here she steps fully into her own light. There’s a confidence, a clarity, a sense of artistic selfhood that places her among the great storytellers: the honesty of Carmen McRae, Liane Carroll’s fearless emotional openness, June Christy’s cool-school understatement, Annie Ross’s quicksilver lyricism, even the occasional flash of Betty Carter’s elastic phrasing when she stretches time to breaking point.
But let’s be clear - Tina Carr isn’t imitating anyone. Her vocal signature is immediate: warm, smoky, conversational, with that slight ache of vulnerability that invites you in rather than holding you at a distance.
From the first bars, the album glows with a delicious after-hours atmosphere - shaped in no small part by Miguel Gorodi’s trumpet, which lends the whole record a candlelit, late-set shimmer. The band is a dream: Matt Robinson’s piano is spacious and elegant, Tom Ollendorff’s guitar lines drift like shards of moonlight, and Oli Hayhurst grounds everything with quietly authoritative bass. It’s the kind of ensemble that breathes as one.
There’s also some beautifully judged playing from the wider cast. Kieran McLeod’s trombone brings a burnished, late-night warmth to the arrangements - never showy, always shaping the emotional contour of a tune with that soft, sighing tone he does so well. Sam Newbold’s alto sax threads in and out of Carr’s vocals like a second narrator, conversational and lyrical without ever overstating its presence. Rod Oughton’s drumming is a study in intuition - brushwork that seems to think alongside the singer, cymbal colours that hang in the air just long enough to deepen a mood. And Matt Robinson, handling both piano and musical direction, is the quiet architect of the album’s sound world: spacious, patient, unhurried, giving every melody the room it needs to bloom.
And then there’s Aanu Sodipe’s violin, which brings an entirely different kind of magic. It doesn’t ground you in north London at all; instead, it feels as though you’ve been lifted and set down somewhere near Montmartre - that same romantic melancholy, the suggestion of cobblestones at dusk, windows glowing above narrow streets. Carr’s lines float over the ensemble like half-remembered dreams, adding a distinctly cinematic sweep to a record already steeped in moonlight and meaning - and in particular on the title track, Moon Over Mildmay, Carr’s original lyric, set to David Raksin’s Love Song from Apache, is a standout: the sort of tune that feels as though it has always existed, waiting quietly for her to claim it in this configuration.
The Crazy Woman, adapted from the Gwendolyn Brooks poem, is delivered with equal parts sensitivity and bite, Carr shaping the text with an actor’s instinct for subtext. And Ouve o Silêncio - reimagined from Cláudio Santoro’s classical prelude - is simply exquisite, Carr replacing the later-added lyrics with her own and singing it as though the piece had always been destined to carry her words.
Another quiet triumph of the album is the way it bristles with compositions and standards by Mercer, Bernstein, Rodgers, and Strayhorn - heavyweights in their respective corners of the tradition - yet Carr and the band make them feel utterly lived-in. These classics don’t sit beside her self-penned lyrics; they’re woven through them, in dialogue with them. The old and the new, the canon and the personal, each illuminating the other. It’s a delicate balance, and Carr handles it with remarkable poise: nothing feels reverential, nothing feels forced. Instead, the album becomes a kind of musical conversation across decades, styles, and sensibilities - a reminder that the jazz songbook is a living thing, not a museum exhibit.
What binds the album together is truth - her truth. When Carr describes this as a personal record about “otherness… where I am, who I’ve been… trying to find meaning and beauty,” you hear every shard of that journey in the music. There’s no front, no gloss, no theatrical armour. Just a woman rediscovering her love of singing and quietly allowing us to witness it.
Moon Over Mildmay is that rare thing: an album that honours the jazz tradition without ever being constrained by it. Classic yet contemporary, refined yet profoundly human. Even at this early point in the year, could it be a contender for vocal jazz album of 2026.
Tina Carr celebrates the launch at The Mildmay Club on 18 February 2026. If this album is anything to go by, it’s going to be a cracking night. Glenn Wright
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