Straight-Ahead Jazz from Brooks and Jacob

Cover of the album being discussed (from its Amazon.com Web page)

A little over a month ago, Rhombus Records released an American Songbook album entitled Sylvia Brooks Live with Christian Jacob. Amazon.com has created a Web page for this recording. As of this writing, CDs are “Temporarily out of stock;” but the Web page includes hyperlinks for both unlimited streamed listening and MP3 download. Brooks is the vocalist, and Jacob is her pianist. He leads a combo whose members are Jeff Bunnell, alternating between trumpet and flugelhorn, Brian Scanlon on tenor saxophone and flute, and rhythm provided by David Witham (keyboards and accordion), David Hughes on bass, and drummer Kevin Kanner.

This is a “live” album, recorded by Masaki Saito at Herb Albert’s Vibrato Jazz Grill in Los Angeles. Those recordings were then mixed and mastered Tom McCauley. I have to confess that, where vocals are concerned, I have a strong preference for the “straight-ahead” approach to performance. The more familiar the tunes are, the more I crave clarity; and there is no faulting the clarity of Brooks’ delivery. That clarity is appreciated even more in the two original songs that she composed jointly with Jacob, “The Flea Markets of Paris” and “Holding Back Tears.” Jacob also leads an instrumental track of his own composition, “The Red Pig Flew Up The Hill.” (Those that have studied linguistics tend to enjoy examples that are grammatically well-formed but lack any semantic content. Jacob’s title is an example of such a sentence. Noam Chomsky’s favorite example was “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.” Perhaps Jacob will appropriate it for another of his original pieces!)

This is Brooks’ fifth album, and I am a bit embarrassed to admit that it is my “first contact” with her. Mind you, I have been able to enjoy other vocalists that also prioritize clarity, one of my favorites here in San Francisco being Kenya Moses. The American Songbook may not be my favorite jazz genre, but I still enjoy any vocalist that appreciates that need for clarity. Brooks is one of those vocalists, and I would not mind encountering tracks from her previous albums.