Though her early forays were more rock and pop, in recent years Atlanta’s Kayla Taylor has, in partnership with guitarist Steve Moore, found her musical focus with jazz standards. There’s a slight, if persistent, twang to Taylor’s voice that reveals her...
After more than a quarter-century with various vocal groups, including the fine, retro-fitted female trio String of Pearls, jazz educator and vocal therapist Holli Ross has pulled an Annie Ross and delivered her first solo album. Ross’ voice suggests a star...
Listening to the Puppini Sisters is like eating too much peanut brittle. At first bite, the winsome threesome’s chocolate-box harmonies seem mighty tasty, but an entire album of the precise same candy-coated cuteness leaves you craving something—anything—less...
Early on in her still relatively nascent career, Canadian vocalist Diana Panton had the great fortune, and good sense, to align herself with two outstanding jazz countrymen, multi-instrumentalist Don Thompson and guitarist Reg Schwager. It was Thompson who...
Since launching her career in the mid-’80s, Scottish vocalist Carol Kidd has earned plaudits from Peggy Lee, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan and Tony Bennett. In 1990, Sinatra invited her to open for him in Glasgow and subsequently declared her “the best...
Though New Jersey-born Stacey Kent has called London home for two decades, she maintains a special affection for France. The long-ago European trip that led her to her husband—saxophonist, arranger and producer Jim Tomlinson—and the emergence of her music...
Throughout this splendidly realized album, there’s no missing Jacqui Dankworth’s regal heritage. Her mother, Dame Cleo Laine, possesses one of the most distinctive voices in jazz and the echoes are unmistakable, particularly in Dankworth’s immaculate phrasing...
Across a multi-decade career that has included work with Stan Getz, Gerry Mulligan, Gary Burton, Pat Metheny, Phil Woods and Freddie Hubbard, pianist Mitchel Forman has also aligned himself with such top-tier vocalists as Mel Tormé, Astrud Gilberto, Janis...
Jacqui Naylor’s eighth album is also her most democratic. Prior to the recording sessions, Naylor assembled a group of 90 friends and fans, performed 25 songs, asked her guests to rate each on a 1-5 scale, and included the highest-scoring 15 on Lucky Girl...
Belgian vocalist David Linx is to jazz what Rufus Wainwright is to pop, a chameleonic avant-gardist of the first order. Though Linx has been recording since the mid-1980s, a survey of just his 2010 projects—the richly imaginative tribute Follow Jon Hendricks…...
Though the album, Patrizio Buanne’s third, was released overseas in 2009 and has been certified platinum, the young Italian baritone only recently began making waves in the U.S., thanks largely to a PBS special. The sort of waves Buanne makes tend to be...
Simpatico relationships between vocalists and pianists—Shearing and Cole; Evans and Bennett; Bill Charlap and his mother, Sandy Stewart—are hardly unusual. Occasionally, though, such unions transcend sympathetic rapport and become truly empathetic. The finest...
When the rest of the baby-boomers were wrapped up in the Beatles and the Stones, Christopher Loudon was discovering Sinatra, Fitzgerald and Bennett. Since 2003, Loudon has critiqued upwards of 700 vocal albums in these pages and shaped about a dozen profiles, including Diana Krall, Tony Bennett, Harry Connick Jr., Roberta Gambarini, Jamie Cullum, Nancy Wilson, Curtis Stigers and Dianne Reeves.
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