The Vocal Sound Of Jazz

2025 is a milestone year for The Vocal Sound of Jazz as it marks the beginning of my 45th year of producing the program.  The opportunity to create and produce this show each week is something that I have never taken for granted.  It’s an opportunity that came to me through a strange happenstance.   In the late 1970s I wrote a column for “Metro Magazine”(RIP) a lifestyle publication covering Southeastern, Virginia.  The column was lamenting the fact that public radio in our area was almost exclusively a classical music station serving the same market that had a very vibrant and successful full-time commercial classical music station (WGH-FM).  They aired no jazz, no alternative music, and very little folk music.   Shortly after the column was published, I got a call from the station’s GM and during our conversation he mentioned that the station was making some changes and would be widening its musical scope.    I mentioned to him that if that ended up happening that I had an idea for a radio program – a show devoted entirely to jazz vocal music.  About a year later my phone rang and the opportunity presented itself.  In my wildest imagination it never occurred to me that nearly 45 years later I would still be at it and enjoying it more than...

THE PEARLFISHERS – MAKING TAPES FOR GIRLS

After a hiatus of five years, The Pearlfishers, Glasgow’s finest, return with their ninth album for Marina – most probably their best and most immediate one so far. Driven by main man David Scott’s exceptional songwriting and sophisticated arrangements, Making Tapes For Girls is a goldmine of pop gems – full of witty & colourful lyrics about the affirmative & healing power of music and pop escapism. The title track evokes memories of those days of compiling a C-30/60/90 for your loved one or secretly adored one: “I didn’t know how to say the right thing / So I left it to Joni and Paul…”. Those mix tapes that came straight from your heart & soul – “the nub of it, the truth of it, the ‘you’ of it.” It is another Pearlfishers classic in the vein of My Dad The Weatherfan and Even On A Sunday Afternoon and also David Scott’s nod to Terry Hall’s The Colour Field. All of these 12 new tracks could have made it easily onto such a tape. Kisses On The Window is a very personal and straightforward love song, with a beautiful string quartet arrangement. Hold Out For A Mystic, most definitely the only song in pop history which references Henri Matisse and Billy Childish in the same line (“The Fauve and the Stuckist man”), is built around a cosmic ELO acoustic guitar sound, while Put The Baby In The Milk channels Carole King jumping through some harmony hoops à la Laura Nyro. We experience more name dropping in The Word Evangeline, a rumination on all songs featuring that name, from The Cocteau Twins to Emmylou Harris to Matthew Sweet. Yellow & The Lovehearts is a wonderful two part suite that takes us from full-on shiny pop to a glacial Simon & Garfunkel soundscape. We are even visiting a Fleetwood Mac-ish vibe...

Jackie & Roy – TIME & LOVE

With the backing of a large orchestra, lush even by arranger Don Sebesky‘s standards, Jackie and Roy front an exquisitely recorded Creed Taylor production that mostly falls outside the idiom of jazz into a polished, jazzy, classical/easy listening plane. More to the point, the collective taste of Taylor and the Krals is incredibly rich, for they tap into a small mother lode of scintillating contemporary material that jazz people rarely touched, then or now — like Leonard Bernstein‘s beguiling “A Simple Song” (from Mass) or Michel Colombier‘s “We Could Be Flying” (the high point of his Wings pop symphony). Sebesky‘s arrangements burrow deeply into his classical sources, whether juxtaposing Bach‘s “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” on top of the title cut or dovetailing Debussy‘s “Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun” into Jerome Moross‘ “Lazy Afternoon”; Villa-Lobos‘ “Bachianas Brasileiras No. 5” is a perfect choice for a genre-fusing vocalese by Jackie. Paul Desmond pokes his quizzical head into the Brubeck/Gershwin medley “Summer Song/Summertime” — who better than old Paul? — and Hubert Laws enhances the Bernstein and Colombier tunes. Although neither Jackie nor Roy do anything resembling jazz singing here, forget about categories; this is gorgeous music that cannot be shackled to one genre. By: by Richard S. Ginell (For All...

HAILEY BRINNEL – BEAUTIFUL TOMORROW

Outside in Music is proud to announce the March 17, 2023 release of Beautiful Tomorrow, the sophomore recording from vocalist and trombonist Hailey Brinnel. When asked to define her style, the Philadelphia-based artist, whose sound is steeped in swing and bebop, describes her effort to move the genre into new spaces: “I like pushing the limits of the idiom, while staying true to jazz.” Alongside her entrusted quartet with Joe Plowman on bass, Dan Monaghan on drums and Silas Irvine on piano, Brinnel presents her extraordinary comprehension of vintage material throughout this new enterprise, offering two original compositions and eight arranged standards. Special guest trumpeters Terell Stafford and Andrew Carson join the date as well as saxophonist Chris Oatts . The release of Beautiful Tomorrow follows a milestone year for the multi-talent in 2021. That March, Brinnel released her critically-acclaimed leader debut I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles, which reached #13 on Amazon’s New Release Chart and #44 on Jazz Best-Sellers. Fashioned by her warm and playful arranging expertise, the impressive collection features 8-tracks of early jazz standards. Later that June, Brinnel was named a finalist in the 2021 Sarah Vaughan International Jazz Vocal Competition. Critics have regaled the budding talent for her versatile arranging sensibilities, which remain reverent to jazz tradition yet flushed with contemporary nuance. Gleaned from the eternal optimist Walt Disney, Brinnel launches Beautiful Tomorrow fittingly with a reimagination of the Sherman Brothers classic “There’s A Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow”, a show tune popularly known as Disney’s theme song after being commissioned by the entrepreneur in 1964. Brinnel’s treatment embraces a reduced big band sound with a full horn shout section, where polished and succinct solos from Oatts and Irvine sit at the heart of the glorious arrangement. Two original offerings make up the early tracks of Beautiful Tomorrow, both stellar showcases of Brinnel’s clever and dynamic storytelling...

Janiece Jaffe & Monika Herzig – Both Sides of Joni

   The Both Sides of Joni Project was the product of a period of soul searching during the Covid Summer of 2020.  Vocalist Janiece Jaffe started listening closely to Joni Mitchell’s music and lyrics with her jazz vocalist ears and found truth and wisdom that inspired her and that she wanted to share with the world to inspire others. She studied the words more deeply and got the urge to re-imagine them in jazz arrangements.  “I could almost ‘Hear’ them!” Together with friend and collaborator Monika Herzig, they spent many summer days of 2020 in the barn with keyboard and masks working out arrangements and rediscovering Joni’s music.  In March 2021, the arrangements were premiered at the Jazz Kitchen in Indianapolis to most enthusiastic response. Many audience members came together for the first time in over a year and the messages of overcoming challenges, endurance, rebellion, love, and regret rang deep. They decided to record the musicwith a group of outstanding musicians and with community support from a successful Kickstarter Campaign. Just days after the completion of the Master Recording, Janiece left this world unexpectedly after heart surgery. T From the Liner Notes: This album is, first and foremost, about relationships: between Janiece and Monika; between the stretch of time that gave rise to Joni’s songs and the ones we’re living through now; and, most of all, between Janiece and these lyrics. She sings them in a pure and transparent voice, sometimes overdubbing the harmonies she once only imagined, and she moves through a variety of moods: reflective on “Both Sides Now”; startlingly direct on “Don’t Interrupt the Sorrow”; with swinging aplomb on “My Old Man”; longingly, on “River,” her yearning teased out by Dutton’s violin; and, in the middle of “The Hissing of Summer Lawns,” seizing upon the word “darkness,” and then sings wordlessly, in the improvisational style...