Stylistically, Julie Hardy resides somewhere near the midpoint of ’60s icons Lani Hall and Judith Durham. Inspirationally, she’s more at home with Kurt Elling or Bobby McFerrin, painting eloquent tone poems and vibrant scat-framed landscapes as she wanders wherever imagination and keen intelligence lead. Eight tracks shape Hardy’s A Moment’s Glance (Fresh Sound New Talent), divided equally between ingenious covers (including a superbly introspective “Haunted Heart” and a stridently urgent “It’s All Right With Me”) and perspicacious originals (most notably, the angularly romantic title track and euphoric “Growing.”) To extrapolate a Tom Springfield line that Durham made internationally famous, Hardy lives, like Elling and McFerrin, in a musical world of her own, and it is a marvelously dynamic place.
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