Marilena Paradisi with Kirk Lightsey -Someplace Called “Where”

© -Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

From time-to-time, the editorial staff at JazzProfiles likes to turn its attention to vocal Jazz, especially when something new and different catches it’s ear.

Such was the case recently when Marilena Paradisi, a vocal Jazz artist based in Italy reached out with a request to send me her latest recording.

Some Place Called “Where” is the eighth album by the well known italian vocalist Marilena Paradisi and she brings to the music on it a growing lyrical awareness and a very special partnership with the American piano master Kirk Lightsey.

Released by Norwegian label Losen Records [LOS-187-2], Some Place Called “Where” is not a solo vocal album with a guest accompanist.

Rather, it is a duo recording that features Marilena’s voice and Kirk’s piano as they interplay around the music contained in the eight tracks that make up the recording.

Marilena says: “I've been very lucky to see Kirk playing live and every time his pianism struck me: he has style, energy and dynamism. He is a multi-instrumentalist, he plays flute and cello too. He has an unique style, a marvellous touch (he makes the piano singing!) and an unusual harmonic choice, inspired by the classical music he loves. Kirk himself doesn't like being considered as a "jazz musician", he doesn't like the way this word has been used nowaday. Kirk loves to say that music is magic, otherwise it is not music! Kirk keeps on searching for magic when he plays and he encourages you to find it, thanks his skill to play few notes for a magic mood.”

Kirk Lightsey says: “It's a really special project for me because to play in duo and this choice of repertoire makes me find orchestral sound of the piano, which is very important to me. Finding in that music the sound of suspense, mystery, sense of infinite space, affection and emotions is important for my feelings in music. Marilena has a very special voice and a lot of talent, I could say technically for her particular timbre, for intonation, flexibility, musicality, she is expressive and has great timing, but in one word she is very artistic and with this I mean that when she sings she is able to sing her feelings deeply and that's why she's expressive, and perfect for this repertoire.”

The title Some Place Called “Where” comes from a tune written by Wayne Shorter and the background of the tunes that make up the CD and how they were approached by Marilena and Kirk are discussed in the following insert notes by David Fishel which are presented in English followed by an Italian version.

Some Place Called “Where” features eight tracks, a sort of "niche repertoire" with a direct and touching expressiveness of Marilena and Kirk, who travel for forty minutes in their world: improvisation, studies in India and voice as an instrument for Paradisi, glorious and beautiful work with Chet Baker, Dexter Gordon, Pharoah Sanders and Lester Bowie, and love for classical music too, for Lightsey.

This perfect coupling, this musical marriage with its velvety vocals and its pianistic perfection, is a rare delicacy. It is an album filled with melodious and harmonious manoeuvre, implemented with skill and with grace.

Marilena Paradisi conveys raw emotion through her impressive vocal range; she scats, she soars, her voice as much an instrument as Kirk Lightsey’s all-encompassing piano. The overall sound is so much fuller than you might expect from a duo, with Kirk’s progressive harmonic range and quality of touch often presenting an orchestral-sounding accompaniment. But it is the intimacy of the interplay that most impresses. You feel that they are playing – for you!

Italian-born Marilena has been active on the international jazz scene since 1994, with an abundance of recording, concert and master class credits – at the very highest level. American-born Kirk is the consummate maestro. His credit list is of the finest pedigree and includes five albums with Chet Baker – oh, and he also happened to tour with Dexter Gordon from 1979-1983.

The album’s title track is a beautiful rendition of Wayne Shorter’s winding and multifaceted Some Place Called “Where.” A complex tune delivered with clarity and composure.

All the selections in this stress-free zone are lovingly crafted. Tunes such as Portrait (Charles Mingus) and Little Waltz (Ron Carter) and Brazilian songwriter Dori Caymmi’s Like A Lover exemplify music that has been carefully chosen for depth and for sincerity. The final track Fresh Air is a self-descriptive Lightsey/Paradisi original. Kirk also treats us to a charming and lyrical flute solo. It’s the perfect conclusion to a perfect album.”

• David Fishel

“Questo accoppiamento perfetto, questo matrimonio musicale con i suoi velluti e la sua perfezione pianistica, è una delizia rara. È un album pieno di manovre melodiche e armoniche realizzate con abilità e grazia.

Marilena Paradisi trasmette emozioni immediate attraverso la sua impressionante gamma vocale; Lei fa scat, lei svetta, la sua voce è uno strumento tanto quanto l'avvolgente pianoforte di Kirk Lightsey. Il suono complessivo è molto più pieno di quanto si possa aspettare da un duo, con la progressiva gamma armonica di Kirk e la qualità del tocco, quasi da accompagnamento orchestrale. Ma è l'intimità dell'interazione tra i due che più colpisce. Senti che stanno suonando - per te!

Marilena è attiva nella scena internazionale del jazz dal 1994, con un'abbondanza di registrazioni, concerti e studi al massimo livello. Kirk, americano, è il maestro perfetto. Il suo pedigree è dei migliori, tanto da comprendere cinque album con Chet Baker e un tour con Dexter Gordon dal 1979 al 1983.

La title-track è una splendida interpretazione dell'arioso e sfaccettato brano di Wayne Shorter. Una melodia complessa consegnata con chiarezza e compostezza. Tutti i pezzi scelti ed eseguiti in questa dimensione rilassata e intima sono rifiniti amorevolmente. Portrait (Charles Mingus), Little Waltz (Ron Carter) e Like A Lover (Dori Caymmi) sono un buon esempio di questa musica scelta per profondità e sincerità. Fresh Air è un brano di Kirk che rappresenta bene il dialogo tra i due, Kirk ci regala anche un solo di flauto incantevole e lirico. La perfetta conclusione di un album perfetto.”

The following Soundcloud audio-only file presents Marilena and Kirk on Mal Waldron’s Soul Eyes.

Konitz, Lee and Kuroda, Shigeki – Motion!

© -Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

“Kuroda's aim is to express the concept of motion. Using the bicycle as the primary object, he soon added umbrellas. The idea came from a scene in a Hitchcock film.

Maybe it was the sense of mystery created by the visual absence of people, or maybe he simply felt that umbrellas would add mass to his compositions. Other changes in composition have developed over the years: in his early works, the bicycles and umbrellas were floating in vacant space. He then added trees, walls, fences, walkways, with the static structures emphasizing the rushing movement.

He uses a variety of different intaglio printing processes to achieve contrast in his lines some sharp and thin, others thick and blurred" and in his background or colour areas" some smooth and uniform, others dappled or textured.”

- Hanga Ten, Contemporary Japanese Print Website

Kuroda is one of the most important Japanese printmakers living today. He became famous in 1979 when the Cleveland Museum of Art organized the exhibition: 21 Young Contemporary Japanese Printmakers.

Kuroda suggests that things move so quickly in Tokyo that he wants to reflect the speed and movement in his bicycles. The umbrella is a very traditional symbol of Japan.

- The Verne Collection Website

Shigeki Kuroda, a long favorite at Luber Gallery, with his whizzing bicycles. He uses the bike image in the foreground, and is forever designing new environments for them to drive through.

- The Gilbert Luber Gallery Website

“If I were given Lee Konitz's name in a word association test, my automatic corollary term would be ‘integrity.’ At thirty-four, Lee is still firmly self-contained, direct and laconic in speech, and impregnably committed to his own way of personalizing the jazz language. The winds of change that keep most of the jazz world in a perpetual state of hurricane alert (as poll winners are toppled and ‘hippies’ change their definitions of what's ‘in’) have left Konitz unruffled. He keeps deepening the direction he has chosen, works where he can providing he has complete musical freedom, and teaches one day a week. In the past few years, as ‘funky,’ ‘soulful,’ hard,’ and various forms of experimental jazz have nearly monopolized the foreground of jazz publicity, Konitz has become part of what Paul Desmond calls ‘the jazz underground.’

Yet Konitz's jazz conception is so singular and provocative that his influence is still felt, especially in Europe. Nor certainly has that influence disappeared in America. Konitz has set standards of melodic continuity and freshness of line that are respected by musicians who are otherwise widely dissimilar to him in approach; and I'm sure that as the scope of jazz improvisation continues to expand, the worth of

in retrospect and he himself will again be considered an important part of the foreground of jazz explora­tion.

In this set of performances, which are among the most consistently resourceful Konitz has ever re­corded, his distinctive qualities are brought into especially clear focus. If, for one thing, jazz at its most stimulating is indeed ‘the sound of surprise,’ Lee's playing here is constantly fresh and unpre­dictable.

He avoids standardized ‘licks’ and limp cliché with persistent determination and instead constructs so personal and imaginatively flowing a series of thematic variations that the five standards he has chosen become organically revivified. Konitz goes far inside a tune, and unlike many jazzmen who skate on the chord changes or ‘wail’ on the melodic surface of a song, Konitz reshapes each piece entirely so that it emerges as a newly integrated work with permutations of form and expanded emotional connotations that are uniquely different from the results obtained by any previous jazz treatment of the piece. …

Consider the command of his instrument that Konitz must have to execute the swiftly moving and subtly interrelated ideas that make each of his per­formances in this album so pregnant with invention. In addition to the remarkable clarity of Konitz's supple and ingenious lines, he also is intriguingly skillful in the molding of series of climaxes of vary­ing intensities so that a topographical musical map of each performance would show considerably more complexity and variety than is true of the majority of jazz improvisations. Underneath this multi-layered logic of ideas is a firm, complementary resilient rhythmic line that is an integral part of the total design of Konitz's structure. He does not, in short, depend on the rhythm section to swing him but instead fuses with drums and bass so that a rare feeling of tripartite unity of execution emerges from these tracks.”

Nat Hentoff, original liner notes to Motion: Lee Konitz

One of my first impressions of Jazz was the sense of motion I felt while listening to the music.

This feeling of movement was enhanced when I began playing Jazz because I played it on the drums with all four limbs going at the same time, just about all the time.

No other musician experiences Jazz in quite the same way as the drummer.

I’ve been on bikes, in cars, small and large planes and helicopters, and on amusement park thrill rides – none of them compares to the feeling of motion generated by a Jazz group “in full flight” [sorry for the mixed metaphor].

One of the most jarring experiences I’ve ever had with motion in Jazz was my first listening to a Verve LP featuring alto saxophonist Lee Konitz with Sonny Dallas on bass and Elvin Jones on drums that was recorded during the late summer, 1961.

The name of the recording was – you guessed it – Motion: Lee Konitz [released on CD as Verve 314 557 107-2].

The original LP was comprised of the five [5] tunes that Lee, Sonny and Elvin recorded on August 21, 1961. The CD set is on three discs that contains this music plus a number of other tracks made around the same time with Dallas on bass and Nick Stabulas on drums that Konitz labels as “equally compelling.”

Prior to Motion: Lee Konitz, I had been accustomed to hearing Lee on recordings that featured a straight-ahead “Cool” style of Jazz. His improvisation on these recordings from the 1950s was very linear, fluid and heavily influenced by pianist Lennie Tristano’s harmonic conception of the music.

That all changed on Motion: Lee Konitz.

Here, Lee’s solos were very intense and jagged. They were made to sound even more so by his choppy phrasing which stopped and started so often that they forced he listeners’ ears to constantly move in new and different directions.

The rhythmic pulse that drummer Elvin Jones lays down behind Lee on Motion: Lee Konitz was also relatively new to me, sometimes, startlingly so.

With its many accented triplets and other syncopations, Elvin’s drumming interrupted the even flow of time then characteristic of most modern Jazz.

Elvin along with Tony Williams revolutionized modern Jazz drumming by altering its motion away from a linear, metronomic time. Instead of pulling the listener forward, Elvin’s drumming pushed, shoved and bounced the listener in all directions.

Elvin and Tony gave the rhythmic prism of Jazz different angles of acceptance and, as such, changed the manner in which the listener perceived it.

As trumpeter, composer and bandleader Wynton Marsalis once remarked: “Change the rhythm and you change the music.”

Lee, Sonny and Dallas are constantly changing the rhythm on Motion: the motion is still there, but it is unsettled, jagged and implied. It seems to become multi-dimensional, almost like the sense experienced when closing one’s eyes while riding on a roller coaster.

Lee Konitz had this to say about the music on Motion in the liner notes to the original LP:

“When asked on a radio show to comment on one of his records, Lester Young replied: ‘Sorry. Pres, I never discuss my sex life in public.’ Bless his sweet soul!

After over twenty years of playing, I find that music is like a great woman: the better you treat her. the happier she is.

There's not much for me to say about my music -I play because it's one of the few things that make sense to me.

When I left Chicago to come to New York in '48 I had been playing in my own way for a few years, but for various reasons was unable to understand what it was I had hold of. A woman can be very elusive! Then came the first recordings, the little reputation and the working all over the place and practically losing contact with my whole playing feeling.

Fortunately for me, I never really made it profes­sionally, so I've had the chance to relax and get a little insight into my life. Freud said something like it all happens in the first four years of our life and we spend the rest of the time trying to figure out what happened. I guess I've always had some kind of feel­ing to play; now I'm trying to eliminate as much as I can of what it is that prevents it from happening

I've been recording since 1949; I have always tried to improvise — lots of different settings — some things made it for me, some didn't. This particular record means something to me.

It was made one afternoon the end of August with Elvin Jones and Sonny Dallas. This was the first time the three of us had played together: in fact,  I Remember You was the first tune of the session. We just played what would be the equivalent of a couple sets in a club and got these five tune* for the album. Elvin loves to play and gets lots of things going on and the time is always strong; he really is something else. Sonny, to me, is one of the best bass players around. So I was fortunate to have a good strong rhythm section. Playing with bass and drums give* me the most room to go in whichever direction I choose; a chordal instrument is restricting to me.

The thing that I like about this set is that everyone is trying to improvise. The music will speak for itself.”

I was reminded of Lee Konitz’s Motion as a result of a recent viewing of the art of Shigeki Kuroda and after reading this annotation about it on Hanga Ten, a contemporary Japanese print website:

“Kuroda's aim is to express the concept of motion. Using the bicycle as the primary object, he soon added umbrellas. The idea came from a scene in a Hitchcock film.

Maybe it was the sense of mystery created by the visual absence of people, or maybe he simply felt that umbrellas would add mass to his compositions. Other changes in composition have developed over the years: in his early works, the bicycles and umbrellas were floating in vacant space. He then added trees, walls, fences, walkways, with the static structures emphasizing the rushing movement.

He uses a variety of different intaglio printing processes to achieve contrast in his lines some sharp and thin, others thick and blurred" and in his background or color areas" some smooth and uniform, others dappled or textured.”

Upon further research, I located this information about Kuroda on the Ren Brown gallery website - www.renbrown.com

“Born in 1953 in Yokohama, Japan, Shigeki Kuroda’s medium are etching, drypoint, mezzotint & aquatint and mixed media, watercolor paintings

Kuroda is an exciting artist with a distinctive style and subject matter all his own. After graduating from Tama Art University, he began creating intaglio prints in 1976. He did further study in the United States in 1984, under the auspices of a Japanese Government Fellowship.

The works are readily recognizable, usually depicting blurred riders on bicycles, carrying umbrellas. Kuroda has been exploring this theme in a variety of ways, combining the sharp lines of drypoint etching with the softer tones and textures of aquatint, to create vivid prints. 

Although the figures remain similar in each work, the mood is altered by the backgrounds. In each, the artist gives the viewer a sense of the hurried speed of the cyclists, while exploring variations in line, color, texture, composition, mood, and the use of secondary imagery. He says the theme began as an exploration of the circle—horizontal in the umbrella or vertical in the wheel.

Since 2003, Kuroda has done some small prints of flowers, birds and other animals, occasionally with mezzotint. By different techniques applied to a copper plate, Kuroda manages to combine effects in such a fashion as to enchant the viewer. His work has received critical acclaim wherever he has exhibited--both in Japan and abroad. He continues to live with his family in Kanagawa, and travels extensively in the United States and Europe.”

Given my perceived symbiotic relationship in the work of Konitz and Kuroda, I thought it might be fun to put them together in a Jazz/Art video montage.

Third Stream Music - From Three Perspectives - Part 3

© -Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

“When Brandeis University held its fourth Festival of the Creative Arts in 1957 at least one of the programmes represented a most unusual gesture. It consisted of six specially commissioned jazz pieces, and, for what little such distinctions are worth, three were from jazzmen, two from straight composers sympathetic to jazz, and one from a musician active in both spheres.

Though universities are supposed to foster research and other original work, this for many years remained one of the few cases of such an institution doing anything practical to further jazz. To have promoted a concert at which a well known band marketed its familiar product would have been nothing, but here was created a situation in which something new might happen. And there was no aimless or self-indulgent experimenting, an encouragingly high standard being attained by all six composers. One of the pieces may be accounted a partial failure, yet these scores are a mine of ideas for further development.

It might be objected that such commissions, by removing normal commercial pressures, create an artificial situation, that music produced under such circumstances can offer no realistic insight on jazz potentialities, and that the point is proved by so few of the 'ideas for further development' having been widely followed up. But even now it is premature to say that, our perspective being too short. It must be remembered that at all periods of musical history the pieces which really made that history were in their own day the property of only a limited circle of initiates. True, such patronage will seldom be available for jazz until it is safely dead, but it is the worst sort of defeatism to discourage commissions because they are rare.

And there is nothing artificial about the fine quality of the jazz which resulted on this occasion: the best of it affords us a glimpse of the sort of music we might be able to expect if jazz ever breaks away from the normally almost crippling limitations and sense of values of the entertainment business to which it has always been linked. Besides, a good piece of music is its own justification, and compared to its enduring value the conditions under which it was created are finally of little interest.”

- Max Harrison, “The Brandeis Festival LP” in Jazz Retrospect

The Third Stream and After

The following excerpts by Terry Teachout appear in Bill Kirchner, Ed., The Oxford Companion to Jazz and provide a nice recap of where Third Stream music has been as well as where it was in 2000, the year this book was published.

And, in contrast with Gunther Schuller retrospective assessment of the success of the music, Terry also does a thorough job of detailing some of the failures and disappointments associated with Third Stream music.

“Starting in the mid-'50s, the Modern Jazz Quartet, a New York—based ensemble led by John Lewis, recorded a series of compositions by Lewis, including "Vendome" (Prestige, 1954) and "Concorde" (Prestige, 1955), that resembled the experimental works of the West Coast school in their attempt to import fugal techniques into a small-group jazz context.

Around the same time, Lewis and the classical composer Gunther Schuller organized the Jazz and Classical Music Society (originally the Modern Jazz Society), a group devoted to the performance of music "written by composers in the jazz field who would not otherwise have an opportunity for their less-conventional work to be presented under concert conditions."

In 1956 a contingent from the Jazz and Classical Music Society recorded Music for Brass (Columbia, 1956), an album of compositions for brass ensemble by Lewis, Schuller, Jimmy Giuffre, and J. J. Johnson; the following year, a mixed ensemble of jazz and classical instrumentalists led by Schuller recorded Modern Jazz Concert (Columbia, 1957), a collection of six extended pieces by Schuller, Giuffre, Charles Mingus, George Russell, and the classical composers Milton Babbitt and Harold Shapero, all commissioned by and premiered at the 1957 Brandeis University Festival of the Arts. (The contents of these two albums, minus the pieces by Babbitt and Shapero, are now available on the Columbia CD The Birth of the Third Stream.)

Schuller contended in a lecture at the Brandeis Festival that these works represented a new synthesis of jazz and Western art music, which he dubbed "third stream music." Modern Jazz Concert and Music for Brass soon became the subject of intense debate in the jazz community, and numerous other composers, including Teo Macero, Friedrich Gulda, Andre Hodeir, Gary McFarland, Bill Russo, Eddie Sauter, and Lalo Schifrin, began to experiment with related compositional ideas.

Third stream music is typically (though not always) composed for mixed groups of jazz and classical instrumentalists. The standard jazz rhythm section is sometimes omitted — Russo's An Image of Man (Verve, 1958), for instance, is scored for alto saxophone, guitar and string quartet — and the regularly sounded beat of traditional jazz heard only intermittently. In most third stream works, fully written-out ensemble passages, often of considerable musical complexity, alternate with simpler improvised episodes involving one or more jazz soloists.

The inherent tension between composition and improvisation may be emphasized, as in Sauter's Focus (Verve, 1961), a suite for tenor saxophone and strings in which Stan Getz's solo part is completely improvised from beginning to end; in other pieces, such as Schuller's Transformation (Columbia, 1957), the improvised sections are carefully integrated into the larger compositional scheme.

The extent to which the original third stream composers drew on classical techniques varied considerably. Mixed-media works such as Schuller's Concertino for Jazz Quartet and Orchestra (Atlantic, 1960), in which the Modern Jazz Quartet performs the function of the "concertino" ensemble in a concerto grosso, and Giuffre's Piece for Clarinet and String Orchestra (Verve, 1959), a through-composed work whose solo part, though fully notated, presupposes idiomatic jazz inflection, clearly seek to reconcile the disparate elements of jazz and classical music. By contrast, J. J. Johnson's Poem for Brass (included on Music for Brass) and George Russell's All About Rosie (included on Modern Jazz Concert), which are intended for performance by jazz instrumentalists and contain no distinctively "classical" features, conform to the third stream model only in the relative complexity of their harmonic language and formal structure.

The third stream movement continues to this day under the auspices of Schuller and Ran Blake, who chaired the third stream department of the New England Conservatory of Music from 1973, and many highly imaginative mixed-media pieces, including Michael Gibbs's Seven Songs for Quartet and Chamber Orchestra (Gary Burton; ECM, 1973), Claus Ogerman's Symbiosis (Bill Evans; MPS, 1974) and Keith Jarrett's Arbour Zena (ECM, 1975), continued to be premiered and recorded well into the '70s.

Unfortunately, these compositions failed without exception to enter the working repertoires of established soloists and ensembles, and public performances of them are now rare. (Orchestra U.S.A., a third stream ensemble founded by John Lewis in 1962, disbanded three years later, and Stan Kenton's Los Angeles Neophonic Orchestra, a similar group founded in 1965, was equally short-lived.) Much the same has been true of pieces by jazz composers specifically written for performance by classical musicians, such as Dave Brubeck's oratorio The Light in the Wilderness (1968), Roger Kellaway's ballet score PAMTGG (1971), and Anthony Davis's operas X (1985) and Amistad (1997).

The latter failure reflects a practical problem of stylistic integration which is also common to third stream music: not only are most classical musicians unable to improvise, but they find it difficult to realize in performance the unwritten rhythmic nuances intrinsic to the jazz idiom. (In addition, works in which electronically amplified jazz instrumentalists are accompanied by unamplified classical ensembles pose near-insuperable problems of acoustical balance in live performance.)

The larger failure of the third stream idea to engage the interest of more than a small number of major jazz soloists also suggests the possibility of an underlying incompatibility between jazz improvisation, with its spontaneous variations on regularly repeating harmonic patterns, and tightly organized classical structures such as sonata-allegro form, in which there is no room for discursive episodes that are freely improvised rather than organically developed.

For all these reasons, it may be that the future of attempts to synthesize jazz and classical music lies not in third stream works for traditional classical media or mixed groups but in substantially through-composed instrumental pieces written for large and medium-sized jazz ensembles.

Many of George Russell's compositions, including Jazz in the Space Age (Decca, 1960) and Living Time (Bill Evans; Columbia, 1972), fit this description, as do such works as Lalo Schifrin's The New Continent (Dizzy Gillespie; Limelight, 1962), in which Dizzy Gillespie is accompanied by a big band, and Carla Bley's A Genuine Tong Funeral (Gary Burton; Victor, 1967), a "dark opera without words" performed by Bley, the Gary Burton Quartet, and a five-piece horn section. Of comparable interest are such recent extended compositions for jazz orchestra as Bob Brookmeyer's Celebration (1997), Bill Holmes All About Thirds (1998), and Maria Schneider's ballet score The Hand That Mocked, the Heart That Fed (1998), which aspire to more rigorous formal challenges, as well as a higher degree of harmonic and contrapuntal complexity, than the big band scores of the past.

Whether such a synthesis is possible within the less structured framework of small-group improvisation remains to be seen, however, and given the fact that jazz continues to be primarily an improvisationally based small-group music, it seems probable that at least for the present, jazz and classical music will continue for the most part to travel on related but independent stylistic tracks.”

The following video montage is set to Carla Bley's Syndrome as arranged by Mike Abene and performed by the Jazz Orchestra of the Concertgebouw. It will serve as an example of Third Stream in 2009, the year it was recorded at the Bimhuis in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

Monica Ramey and Beegie Adair - "Some Enchanted Evening"

© -Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

For one so “young” [a relative term as it is used here], it is amazing to hear Monica Ramey’s singing of standards from the Great American Songbook in a manner that is evocative while not succumbing to sentiment. Unlike the song stylings on so many of today’s vocal CDs, Monica does not try to insert heightened meaning and artificial passion into the lyrics.

Over the course of her, as yet, relatively modest career, Monica has managed to develop the vocal skills and faculties that allow her to produce work that helps her listeners gain a better understanding of the Great American Songbook music, despite the fact that we’ve all heard most of the tunes she sings many times before.

There is a maturity in Monica’s rendering of a song that compliments her choice of material in her latest CD Some Enchanted Evening which includes tunes from some legendary Broadway shows as written by Frank Loesser, Irving Berlin, Lerner and Loewe, Rodgers and Hammerstein and George and Ira Gershwin.

In other words, she measures up to the immense talents of those who wrote the songs she sings. She sings the lyrics with a respectful restraint instead of an emotional fawning; there is no exaggerated flattery or obsequiousness.

I suspect that some of these attributes in her growth and development have come from her long association with pianist Beegie Adair, an experienced and gifted musician, who works with Monica effortlessly, never pushing or leading, but always accompanying, suggesting and gently guiding.

Monica’s latest CD offer new exploration of an art that originated in a time when to say “good popular music” was not an oxymoron.

Some Enchanted Evening is subtitled piano and vocal music from My Fair Lady, The King and I, South Pacific, Kiss Me, Kate, Oklahoma!, Guys and Dolls, Carousel and more.

The voice-piano contrast of hearing the songs out of the context of their original and extravagant orchestral productions is as striking as it is satisfying.

What happens to these tunes in the quieter environment that Monica and Beegie have created is that they become more expressive and accessible.

The lights, sets, movements, orchestra in the pit, acting, dancing and gestures that usually surround these songs when they are performed on the big stage by a large Broadway show company are replaced by the intimacy of the piano lounge which finds Monica seated at or near Beegie on the piano bench singing to “you.”

As a result, you hear these lyrics in a new way, almost, perhaps as the composer and lyricist heard them when they were first inventing them.

Monica and Beegie create an intimacy that helps give new interpretations to the likes of They Say It’s Wonderful, C’est Magnifique, Someone to Watch Over Me and nine other Broadway show selections some of which have become “chestnuts” over the years [piece of music in the repertoire that has grown stale or hackneyed with too much repetition].

Another great benefit from the subsiding of the fanfare usually associated with these songs is that the piano-vocal setting allows us to hear the musicianship of Monica and Beegie; how they go about their business in making the music be it in their choice of tempo or key or rhythm. The duo framework is as simple as it gets and if you are not up to it there’s nowhere to hide. But when it clicks, it is as direct a connection as you get between the music and the musicians.

Louis Armstrong was fond of saying the “Jazz is who you are.” Implicit in this statement is that the music is an honest representation of the people making it.

If you want to know who Monica Ramey and Beegie Adair are, just listen to Some Enchanted Evening. They are all there and the music that they make together is wonderful … er … S’Wonderful.

Order information is available at www.greenhillmusic.com

And you can preview all the songs on this CD via this link.