Learning to Listen Excerpt 16: "Pop" without apology: The soul of Holly Cole

July 01, 2017 by Vincent Stephens

Holly Cole (b. 1963) is an exemplary singer of superior popular songs. She is perhaps the quintessential model of what a modern interpreter of popular songs can achieve to appeal to contemporary ears and reach toward the vocal pantheon. From the outset of her recording career (the Nova Scotia native debuted in Canada on 1990’s Girl Talk; her U.S. debut was 1992’s Blame it On My Youth) she has been the kind of singer critics seeking a quality pop experience long for. She is a jazz-oriented singer whose innovative style defies the fuddy-duddy image many young people have of jazz. Cole is also the kind of pop/rock-oriented singer that jazz folks and other discriminating audiences can embrace without embarrassment. Essentially everybody wins when listening to Holly Cole sing.

The cover of Holly Cole's 2007 masterpiece of swing and noir ballads.

The shape of her recording career reveals her talent for drawing on jazz, cabaret, soul and rock elements deftly. She also continually defies the Peggy Lee/Julie London style “ingénue” tag lazy critics apply to any white female singer who sings standards. On Blame it on My Youth and 1993’s Don’t Smoke in Bed she demonstrates several core values including her ability to locate the best popular songs from various eras and her desire to interpret them freshly; the ability to swing; talent for singing a ballad tenderly; and most importantly, the ability to imbue songs with humor, flair, and emotional intelligence. These sensibilities culminate in a clear view of her as a modernist with classicist tendencies.

As a vocalist born in the mid-1960s Cole is part of a generation of musicians whose recordings more inclined toward sparseness than excess and more self-effacing than attention-hungry. On these initial albums, the billing is the Holly Cole Trio which provides room for pianist Aaron Davis, and bassist and percussionist David Piltch to share the spotlight. The tightness of their unit, augmented by guest soloists, makes it easier for the group to craft and sustain a voice as opposed to the more faceless big ticket production style that can easily overwhelm a new singer in the jazz/cabaret field.

Cole began her recording career as a band leader of Trio featuring piansit Aaron Davis and bassist/percusisonist David Piltch.

1990’s Girl Talk is raw—there are times when she pushes her voice to explosive limits and needs to tone things down as on an overdramatic “Spring Can really Hang You Up the Most. ” But even when she overshoots you want to know what’s next. At her best moments, she is smart and poised. “Talk to Me Baby” is a delicate plea sung gently and tenderly; it is a remarkable display of control. She wraps her sumptuous voice around a funky “Cruisin’ ”—Smokey Robinson has rarely sounded so slyly sexy. “Girl Talk” is knowing and ironic; “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” breaks your heart. At the outset, she establishes key aspects of her musical character and persona.

The attitude on Blame is openhearted, but emotionally firm. Cole avoids lazy nostalgia and brazen irony, which makes Blame It on My Youth consistently inviting. She has glorious fun with “If I Were a Bell,” possesses perfect timing for the bite of Lyle Lovett’s sardonic “God Will,” and gives a big hearted yearning rendition of Bob Telson’s “Calling You.” In the world of the Cole Trio Tom Waits (“Purple Avenue”) is on equal footing with Frank Loesser and each is song is a mini-statement interpreted with melodic respect and lyrical precision. There is also a refreshing mix of rhythmic variety and harmonic scope. “God Will” plays like a blues ballad in the Charles Brown mold. Cole voices a swinging “If I Were a Bell” with a sassy sexual forthrightness that updates the goofy lyrics, and the piquant violin solo (courtesy of Johnny Fringo) drives the tune home. “Honeysuckle Rose” has a stirring bounce that builds into double time climax. “Calling You” is sung with the intensity of a field holler—there’s a stirring rawness to her performance that convinces me that it is one of the best torch songs ever. It’s no coincidence that singers as diverse as George Michael, Jeff Buckley, Paul Young, Patti Austin, Natalie Cole, Barbra Streisand, Etta James , among others heard something worthwhile in the song. Holly Cole’s version might be the best yet.

1992's Blame it On My Youth is an eclectic masterpiece featuring sterling interpretation from writers as varied as Frank Loesser and Lyle Lovett.

Don’t Smoke in Bed is also a Trio record with standards and new pop, but is even bolder in many respects. She and her Trio transform Johnny Nash’s sunny “I Can see Clearly Now” from a light pop song to a stunning anthem of optimism. As the song builds from blue skies to clear skies the harmonies soar and so does Cole—it may be her most transcendent vocal moment. “So and So,” which I was unfamiliar with previously, is a swinging bass driven number sung with believable anger and resignation, and has a unique moment where Cole chants indecipherably to herself over finger snaps. She renders “Everyday Will Be Like a Holiday,” a ‘70s Philly Soul hit, as a secular gospel song. She and her bandmates make it strut as a mid-tempo soul-torch song, with sizzling Joe Henderson sax solos and gospel piano, rife with layers of yearning and glee that unfold bar-by-bar to the point of nearly exploding.

It is notable that this was released in the same year Cassandra Wilson’s classic Blue Light Til’ Dawn featured a radically haunting interpretation of the Philly Soul song “Children of the Night.” Wilson’s chief interpretive tool was to place songs under a blanket of blue harmonies with African-inspired chanting and percussion and slow tempos. Comparatively, Cole favors a gradual accumulation of small gestures that sweeps you up into a big emotional build. Cole did not receive the same level of acclaim, but what she achieves is as sublime and surprising.

Cole delves deeper into the chanteuse mold recording the bittersweet Willard Robison penned Peggy Lee vehicle “Don’t Smoke in Bed” and Kurt Weill’s “Je Ne T’Aime Pas.” She sings them as hauntingly beautiful as you expect, but they are conventional compared with some of the odder songs. More memorable are her takes on curios like “Que Sera Sera” and “The Tennessee Waltz” which she sings with an adult sensibility beyond their hit versions by Doris Day and Patti Page respectively. On a whole the production is bigger, including a few string arrangements and more guests, and the repertoire is a bit more traditional (including Cole Porter’s “Get out of Town” and “Blame it On my Youth”), but it confirms the Trio’s fresh approach to pop of many stripes.

Some critics frame Cole as a jazz singer; others view her as a kind of postmodern cabaret singer. In truth her choices suggested a greater loyalty to her developing hybrid of contemporary and classic pop than a particular genre. 1995’sTemptaiton, a Tom Waits songbook album solidifies the translation of her unique language. The choice of Waits is interesting for being the first of its kind in the jazz world and for anticipating a generational reverence for Waits that eventually came in the 2000s. Like Cole, Waits draws careful flecks from the past—notably blues and jazz—to color his self-portrait. He also experiments relentlessly, avoiding genre, which make he and Cole a logical match.

Rather than approaching Waits’s songs as pop songs in need of obvious swing elements or “jazzing up,” the Trio continues to approach songs sparsely treating each song as a unique artifact whose content should dictate the approach. Waits’s songs tend to be character sketches representing aspects of his persona and can be melodically slight. Cole, however, does for him what Jennifer Warnes did for Leonard Cohen—she renders them as melodically interesting songs with enough meat for a skilled vocalist to go to new places. The most successful performances draw on Cole’s honed sense of phrasing and the Trio’s impressive arranging choices. Waits’s songs require a certain mastery of tone and a sense of character to work, and Cole understands these qualities.

“I Don’t Wanna Grow Up” is a tender lullaby on the terror of adulthood sung from a child’s point of view. Cole is a reliable narrator who walks you through a kind of general lament to the overwhelming depiction of instability and anger the lyrics portray. “Jersey Girl” has a trashy slant with overdubbed “sha-la-las.” Cole makes for a convincing waitress in “Invitation to the Blues” and projects just the right amount of world weariness on “Tango Til They Sore” and “The Heart of Saturday Night.” Not everything sticks out from the set, but it’s notable nonetheless for solidifying a kind of experimental approach to interpretation that’s modern but undefinable. Temptation has rock-ish elements but I would hardly call it rock or modern rock; there is a moodiness with cabaret overtones, but there is a viscerality here traditionally lacking in cabaret. Jazz elements surface here and there, but the rhythms are only tangentially related. I raise this only because this is one of the few albums I can think of that a die-hard fan of any of these genres could enjoy without a second thought.

Cole’s turn toward rock occurred ostensibly on 1997’s Dark Dear Heart. Cole interprets material by the Beatles, Joni Mitchell, and Sheryl Crow, and works with Larry Klein, a pop/rock producer previously married to Mitchell. The instrumentation has a traditional rock rhythm section with electric guitar, drums, electric bass, and modern touches like drum loops. This may sound like pandering or selling out to pop. However, these are not radio-friendly tunes and Cole always defies your expectations. Temptation freed Cole from the cabaret and jazz tags, and this album probably felt freeing as well given her clear awareness and affinity for contemporary songs.

I am not sure if it would immediately catch the attention of a traditional jazz or cabaret listener, but it would certainly draw a rock fan to Cole’s catalog. This is a moody album with a torchy undercurrent. The pained ballad “Make It Go Away” and the waltz “Onion Girl” are great cry-in-your-cocktail songs that work on their own terms. Mitchell’s “River” can lapse into simpiness in the wrong hands, but Cole rises above sentimentality giving it a tough yet tender reading. Many of the songs revolve around the need for heartache to be heard and consoled, and sustain a haunted, melancholic mood leavened by glints of humor and irony. Cole gradually builds from a menacing and seductive version of Lennon and McCartney’s “I’ve Just Seen a Face” to a series of eclectic laments including “Onion”’s waltz, the funk inflected mid-tempo ballads “World Seems to Come and Go” and “Hold On,” and moody midnight ballads like the vampish “Timbuktu” and a trumpet spiked “All the Pretty Little Horses.” This is a progressive, entrancing recording that defies easy categorization—much like its interpreter.

On this 2000 album Cole digs into the songbooks of The Shirelles, Paul Simon, and Frank Sinatra brilliantly.

2000’s Romantically Helpless is a seamless fusion of her catholic music interests. Its rock instrumentation resembles Dark Dear Heart, but conceptually it completes the virtual trilogy begun by Temptation. The way she employs Sammy Cahn, Johnny Mercer, Randy Newman, the Shirelles, Stephen Sondheim, and Paul Simon to tell her tale may make her one of the most resourceful and genuinely versatile singers in pop music. Her ability to draw these together to convey the promise and disappointment of love is a masterstroke. For example, “Come Fly with Me” is not played as the breezy invite Sinatra offered. Cole sings it as a plea for a lover to live a little, but also to give her a last chance emotionally. In slowing the tempo and brushing the song in a bluer vocal shade, she treats it as a living text worthy of a fresh take.

2003’s Shade (rare but available as an import) is Cole’s most fully realized vision of interpreting standards in a contemporary vein. Jazz-oriented, but not beholden to jazz technique, Cole sores (or rather shimmers) as a vocalist, arranger, and musician, playing xylophone and glockenspiel on a few tunes. Thematically speaking her tone is cool but she emits sizzling sensuality throughout building the tensions on tunes like “Too Darn Hot” and “Heat Wave.” In addition to these blistering efforts Cole conveys immense tenderness in a deep reading of “God Only Knows” (the only rock era standard here) and a mystical, hushed performance of “We Kiss in a Shadow.” The fresh arrangements, mastery of tone and Cole’s overall emotional command make this a genuine masterpiece of jazz-based expression.

There is a fearlessness in these first six albums that makes her virtually unrivaled among other interpretive singers of her generation. As a Canada-based artist Cole has had far less visibility in the U.S. than many other acts, but her albums are easy to find and ripe for discovery. She is comparable to singers like Janis Siegel, Diane Schuur, Patricia Barber, and Cassandra Wilson. She breaks stylistic boundaries and explores the ways jazz, rock, soul, and pop can speak to each other fluently in a contemporary interpretive language.

On 2007’s Holly Cole the singer records one of her most overtly jazz-oriented sets in years. Drawing songs mostly from American musical theater and film themes with a touch of Brazilian and American pop, she is really in her element. The performances are uniformly focused and convincing highlighted by her swinging rendition of “It’s All Right with Me,” lovingly romantic, delicately-paced versions of the 60’s film ballads “Charade” and the chanson “I Will Wait for You,” and her cinematic rendition of the obscure “The House is Haunted by the Echo of Your Last Goodbye.” Over 15 years into her recording career and Cole is still reaching toward her zenith.

2011’s Steal the Night is a live concert featuring Cole classics like “Calling You” and “I Can See Clearly Now” sung with gusto and taste. She also mixes in cool tunes like “Good Time Charlie’s Got the Blues.” If anything, the set, at 40 minutes, is too short! For U.S. listeners it was actually a warm up for 2012’s Night a concept set featuring fresh takes on night themed songs. Cole has a perceptive concept of noir featuring a James Bond theme (“You Only Live Twice”), Gordon Lightfoot (“If You Could Read My Mind”), Elvis (“Viva Las Vegas”), and Jerome Kern (“I Only Have Eyes for You”) plus several originals. Only Cole could synthesize these into an entertaining romp through the shadows of night. Her ability to modernize these songs and reframe them to advance her theme is surprisingly coherent and satisfying.

On 2012's Night, Cole modernizes songs from pop musicals, an Elvis movie, and Gordon Lightfoot, among other sources.

Though Holly Cole is best appreciated as an album maker the Canadian pressing of her 2004 compilation The Holly Cole Collection Volume I is the best overview of the first few years of her career. The set provides obvious highlights and signatures such as the pulsating “I Can See Clearly Now,” the spare and wistful “Calling You,” and her brilliantly intimate take on “Come Fly With Me.” The collection also includes selections from Shade and rarities like her covers of Prince’s “The Question of U,” Tom Waits’s “Shiver Me Timbers” and the jazz classic “Humdrum Blues.” The Collection Vol. 1 presents her skill and range in exemplary fashion and makes you curious for the next volume.

Learning to Listen (LTL) Excerpt 11: Roy Hamilton: Star, pioneer, and misfit

December 31, 2015 by Vincent Stephens

As I write this there is an online petition for those who support the induction of black baritone Roy Hamilton (1929-69) into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Given his influence on Elvis Presley, Jackie Wilson, and the Righteous Brothers this only seems fair. Hamilton’s classic versions of “Hurt” and “Unchained Melody” were popular hits for him and became, arguably, the definitive versions. If the purpose of institutions like the Hall is to recognize talented and influential performers Hamilton easily earns this distinction.

Source: http://www.waybackattack.com/hamiltonroy.html

Pop music is filled with classically trained male singers who have translated operatic technique into pop. These include Italianate balladeers like Mario Lanza, singing actors including Robert Goulet, Gordon MacRae, John Raitt and Paul Robeson, jazz-oriented singers like Johnny Hartman, and actual Italian crossover-pop acts like Andrea Bocelli. Though R&B music has its share of robust vocalists it is rarely associated with the refinement and technique native to the operatic tradition. Roy Hamilton was among the first commercially significant singers to challenge such a dichotomy. Hamilton began recording in 1954 when he scored an R&B and pop hit with his interpretation of “You’ll Never Walk Alone” which gained a new life when it went from being a show tune to a civil rights anthem during the early 1960s.

Hamilton, as I discuss in other chapters, represents the liminal position many black singers found themselves in during the mid-1950s-mid-1960s. Music was already racially segregated in the industry in the early 1950s when Hamilton began recording, and as rock ‘n’ roll grew more prominent music grew more socially divided into markets. R&B was for blacks, rock was for teenagers, and LPs were for adult buyers of classical, jazz, and Broadway music. Among the victims of these formulas were black singers who straddled the boundaries between pop, R&B, and jazz, which seem much clearer today than they did in the 1950s.

Dinah Washington is commonly referred to as a jazz singer today, but she was actually the most prominent female vocalist in commercial R&B from late 1940s-early 1960s, as well as a respected jazz-oriented singer, and an accomplished interpreter of the classic blues. Similarly performers like Gloria Lynne, Nancy Wilson, Ernestine Anderson, and Dakota Staton all began singing between the late 1950s and early 1960s and have all blurred (artificial) genre boundaries which limited their careers, with the exception of Wilson. It may sound essentialist to say this, but my impression is that, at the time, black singers working in R&B, jazz and blues were viewed by black audiences as simply making black music—i.e. music made by black musicians which was important since in the era of segregation (and post-segregation) black culture was primarily marketed to black audiences through radio stations, stores, and performance venues aimed at blacks.

Hamilton is broadly considered an R&B singer since he was a black man, with a background in gospel music, whose greatest commercial successes appeared on the R&B singles chart. But in reality this tells little of his complicated story. Collectables Records has reissued his Epic recordings spanning from 1954-62 and they demand some serious questioning of what R&B and black pop can mean. The bulk of his Epic LPs are standards albums comprised of the kinds of songs Sinatra, Como, Eckstine, and Cole sang including Roy Hamilton, With All My Love, Come Out Swingin,’ Why Fight the Feeling?, and Soft ‘N’ Warm. The first is a mix of ballads and mid-tempo arrangements; the second is primarily lushly arranged ballads; Come and Why are big band swing sets, and Soft is a ballad set. As a vocalist Hamilton is interesting because he is too gospel to sound like a straight crooner, too polished to adhere to conventions of R&B voices of the time, more rhythmically conservative than a traditional jazz singer, and yet too mature to fit into the sound of rock ‘n’ roll and teen pop. His focus on standard material was such that his two ventures outside of this are the overt genre sets Spirituals and the rock and R&B-oriented Mr. Rock ‘N’ Soul which still includes a fair share of standards. Hamilton’s confidence with some of popular music’s most harmonically complex pop ballads (“All the Thing You Are”) and swingers, and his comfort with gospel reflect his formal classical vocal training and his pre-fame gospel roots. Given this it’s not surprising that Rock ‘N’ Soul is his least convincing set. Hamilton is always professional and the set has some entertaining performances, but as a whole it feels overtly trendy.

The bonus tracks featured on some of his reissued LPs and the two singles collections You’ll Never Walk Alone and Golden Boy reveal the dual personality Epic was trying to create for him. Walk mixes classy ballad fare like “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” “Ebb Tide,” “Unchained Melody,” and “If I Loved You” that reiterates the commercial relevance of this material even as rock ‘n’ roll was making commercial inroads. Golden Boy leans toward R&B material like “Hurt” (a hit for Timi Yuro in 1961), MOR (“Love is a Many Splendored Thing”), and forgettable pop songs. The bonus tracks on his albums also tend toward trendy ephemeral material.

Source: amazon.com.

As a musical figure Hamilton has a strange place in pop historical lore. Though his robust vocal style and creamy timbre is evident in Presley, Wilson, and others he is not commonly referenced as his talent and influence would merit. He is referenced in Soul in the City, Brian Ward’s Just My Soul Responding, and Peter Guralnick’s biography Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke. He was featured in the second edition of the Rolling Stone Encyclopedia, but was deleted from its most recent edition published in 2001. The recent reissues of his material explain his absence from the 1992 Rolling Stone Album Guide (updated in 2003 but with no Hamilton entry) and the Musichound R&B Guide (published 1998). His refined enunciation and phrasing, romantic sensibility, and penchant for smooth balladry and light swing is quite different from the kind of visceral R&B that has made R. Kelly, Usher, and other more recent figures popular.

Listening to his recordings it’s clear that he was talented, versatile, and influential but he’s a hard figure to place. His fate is similar to that of Ed Townsend. Townsend, who is best known for the 1959 pop and R&B hit “For Your Love,” was a smooth crooner with a big voice who loved singing with an orchestra. Though he is remembered as an R&B singer, the handful of albums he recorded for Capitol Records were not jukebox fare. Rather they were lushly arranged orchestral renditions of popular standards. Townsend’s Capitol period was short and he never rebounded as a singer, though he became a successful songwriter.

It’s hard not to empathize with them since their respective legacies are endangered by the rigid generational, racial, and genre boundaries popular music has been adhering to since the beginning of commercial pop music, but that grew especially prominent during the 1950s. The rise of R&B made a space for gospel-influenced black performers to enter into the commercial mainstream. But pressures for black performers to either perform exclusively in this mode, or to tone down these elements to make them more marketable to white audiences is one of the great compromises in pop music that marginalizes less malleable talents. The brand of gentlemanly pop Hamilton and Townsend performed placed them out of vogue with rock ‘n’ roll and mainstream R&B which was unusual, especially for black performers from the mid-1960s onward [....]

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For more information on the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame petition visit: http://royhamilton.net/

Check out this essay on Hamilton’s influence on Elvis Presley: http://www.elvisinfonet.com/presley_hamilton_spotlight.html

LTL 8 (Bonus cut): Laura Fygi the Continental: Jazz’s international pop-classicist

October 09, 2015 by Vincent Stephens

From the mid-1940s-early 1960s solo singers, who grew up when jazz, big band music, and swing were popular, dominated popular music. Though sometimes labeled as an era of jazz-oriented singers this is too generic. This broad descriptor includes three types of singers: jazz based improvisers like Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan who could improvise and sing “straight” pop equally well; pop singers who sang a mix of standards and newer pop hits but stuck with songs as written, which applies to everyone from Shirley Bassey to Andy Williams; and finally there were the go-betweens—people like Tony Bennett, Rosemary Clooney, Kay Starr, Frank Sinatra and Nancy Wilson singers who were inspired by jazz, worked with jazz musicians, and were respected in the field but were synonymous for pop.

Since the late 1960s pop music has become so stratified commercially that there is no middle ground between jazz and pop. You’re either in the mainstream or you’re not. Even the most popular jazz-oriented singers, like Diana Krall and Natalie Cole, are inconsistently popular. Since the mid-1990s Krall has collected a clutch of gold albums, three platinum sets and one double platinum album. The latter, Live in Paris was released in 2002. Her last gold record was released in 2005. Cole’s 1991 hit Unforgettable with Love was an unusual pop phenomena certified seven times platinum. Her later jazz themed sets were far less popular. 1993’s Take a Look was certified gold and 1996 Stardust is platinum. Her 1999-2008 efforts Ask a Woman who Knows, Snowfall on the Sahara, and Still Unforgettable, have yet to go gold. Though Michel Bublé has won several traditional pop vocal Grammies and sings standards, he is a pop singer with jazzy tendencies placing him in the go-between area though he leans more toward pop than jazz.

Laura Fygi photo from http://www.laurafygi.com/media/

A more interesting singer who straddles the pop jazz axis but is of interest to jazz listeners is Laura Fygi. Fygi, is of Dutch and Egyptian parentage, but was born in Amsterdam. I discovered her randomly on a Pandora station singing “Quiet Nights of Quiet Stars (Corcovado)” one of the more common bossa nova warhorses that is sung so often it essentially evaporates. But something about her approach made me pay attention, enough that I bought her album of bossa nova style arrangements on 1994’s The Lady Wants to Know. She enchanted me instantly with her husky timbre, hushed vocal style, and vulnerable approach to lyrics, which come across beautifully in two Michael Franks songs “Tell Me All About It” and the title track. Though the album is bathed in strings and light reverb/echo these are appropriate for an album aiming to make you swoon. Instead of making a Caymmi/de Moraes/Jobim/Lins/Nascimento cover album, which is the wont of jazz and cabaret singers, she opts for a few oddball choices including Everything But the Girl’s “Each and Everyone,” and new songs like the cheeky “Oh Telephone,” and the luscious “Something About Him.” Though she flows with melodies rather than reworking them drastically the cadences of her phrasing have an appealing off-kilter rhythm similar to the light touch of an Astrud Gilberto but with greater musical precision.

I always get the sense that there is more she could show you but she’s being intentionally modest. The pop vs. jazz singing issue is difficult to discuss without sounding elitist. Pop music would be incredibly boring without variety. Everyone can’t do what Anita O’Day or Jon Hendricks does with songs, nor should everyone have to. But pop-jazz can easily lapse into MOR mush without some artistic intent beyond singing well and sounding good. With this kind of blurred pop-jazz music, melodic but orbiting toward jazz, tone is sacrosanct. Overselling kills the mood and instantly lands you in the pop stratosphere which favors bombast.

This is the difference between a sensualist like Fygi and the challenges of many of Linda Ronstadt’s ‘80s recordings with Nelson Riddle. She has a lovely voice and chose great songs but sometimes she belted when crooning would have been more effective. There must be winks and sighs embedded for classic romantic pop to work especially if you’re aiming for something smoldering or torchy. Fygi got this from the start evidenced on her second album 1992’s Bewitched a moody noir-ish album that dares to mix electronic textures, mostly keyboards and little synthesizer effects, with strings, and it gels surprisingly well. This is due in part to her choice to sing the songs anew rather than as honorable museum pieces. This fearlessness makes it easy to enjoy her slinky phrasing on the shimmering arrangements of “I Only Have Eyes for You” and “Dream a Little Dream” without rolling your eyes. There’s just enough freshness in the arrangements and spark in her singing to make them work on their own terms.

Fygi was not exactly bred of jazz-inspired singing in the manner of her big band predecessors. She began singing in a pop group called Centerfold before trying jazz at 35. I’m not sure of her exact influences but hear elements of Rita Reys (Europe’s premier jazz diva, also from the Netherlands), Astrud Gilberto, and “cool” singers like June Christy, Chris Connor, and Lucy Reed. In other words her sound is broadly “international” in its flair which isn’t surprising since Fygi is a polyglot. Fygi has little commercial stature in the U.S. but is apparently quite popular in Japan and Europe.

Singers of her generation tend to lean toward Peggy Lee’s minimalism or Betty Carter’s improvisational flair. She’s too emotive to fit into the “cool school” and too conservative to emulate Carter’s bop based approached, which allows her to stand apart. I would nominate her as one of the best pop classicists of her generation; she genuinely loves the classics and values opportunities to give them voice in her way.

One of her more recent albums, 2011’s The Best is Yet to Come, is a big band set featuring pretty obvious standards like the title track, “Smile,” “Cheek to Cheek” etc. There are a few less common songs like “It’s Easy to Remember” but it’s pretty standard standards fare. Despite the predictable track listing it’s perfectly listenable; she imbues it with enough flair to make it memorable. Her jumping version of “Too Darn Hot” trims the “Kinsey Report” line in favor of“latest report” (no ‘40s nostalgia here!), and she inhabits the glorious melodies of “Old Devil Moon” and “You and the Night and the Music” as well as anyone. These qualities are amplified on 2009’s two-disc compilation Songs from Movies & Musicals. The title is misleading since many of the songs are featured in movies rather than written for them specifically, such as “Good Morning Heartache” noted for being sung in Lady Sings the Blues. And since most of her repertoire is standards based, songs that usually emanate from movies and musicals, the label is redundant. Regardless, she is at her best here ranging from ‘40s classics (“As Time Goes By”) to ‘60s film songs (“I Will Wait for You”), and ‘80s film musicals (“The Way He Makes Me Feel”). She also sings worthy pop songs in French, Portuguese, and Spanish, which reflects the diversity of her albums.

As a sensualist Fygi does better in some idioms than others. I don’t hear much blues influence in her singing, and can’t really hear her singing tunes like “Please Send Me Someone to Love,” or “Trouble in Mind.” Though she does not rigidly identify as a hardcore jazz singer and has taken various excursions into contemporary pop of the adult contemporary variety this is not really her métier. Her finest albums are great vehicles for learning the beautiful melodies, rich harmonies, and witty lyrics of “great songbooks” spanning from various eras and continents.