Signature
Signature
Since her captivating debut in 2009, jazz vocalist Sylvia Brooks has displayed a gift for inhabiting different personas, with a subspecialty in filmnoir inspired femmes fatale. On this, her fourth album, she embraces the most challenging role of all, defining herself with a set of beautifully crafted original songs. Her evocative lyrics and emotionally direct delivery imbue the music with hard-won authenticity. Whether looking back with wry affection on her walk-on-the-wild-side youth or lamenting a lost love, Brooks brings bracing honesty and poise to the material.
Artistically, she is collaborating with Southern California’s most creative accompanists: ace pianists Tom Ranier, Jeff Colella, and Christian Jacob designed beguiling, harmonically rich settings for her incisive lyrics. The stellar rhythm section tandem of drummer Ray Brinker and bassist Trey Henry appear on almost every track.
Highlights include the cautionary tale “Red Velvet Rope” which is set to a sensuous Latin groove by cuatro master Kiki Valera, scion of a legendary Cuban musical clan. And she sways through swingtown, from the witty “Catch 22” to the passionately romantic “The Flea Markets of Paris.” The two songs she includes by other artists, Melody Gardot’s bluesy, organ-driven “Your Heart Is as Black as Night” and the Leonard Cohen/Sharon Robinson erotic lament “Boogie Street” seem to raise the temperature of her own work. This album marks a quantum leap reflecting years of concentrated effort.
“I really worked hard on trying to make the stories deeper and richer,” she says, “each song is really a story within itself.
ARTIST: Sylvia Brooks
CD/LP/ALBUM: Signature
LABEL: Rhombus
DATE OF RELEASE: May 30, 2022
CATEGORY: Jazz/Vocal
MUSICIANS:
- Tom Rainer
- Christian Jacob
- Jeff Colella
- Nikos Syropoulous
- Kiki Valera
- Jamey Arent
- Trey Henry
- Kevin Axt
- Cooper Appelt
- Ray Brinker
- Aaron Serfaty
- Ivan Edwards
- John Waltz
- Mike Kaufman
- Stephanie Fife
- David Witham
- Jeff Bunell
- Dave Richards
- Brian Scanlon
- Tom Luer
- Jackie Smiley
- Leah Williams
- Perro Lou
1. Your Heart Is As Black As Night
(blues) Moody and disquieting, Brooks’ version of Gardot’s blues reveals the cold core of a man whose heart is dark and dangerous.
2. Catch 22
(mid-tempo swing) A tribute to Leonard Cohen and Anjani’s haunted, late-night reverie “Blue Alert,” this is a sultry song about the ill-fated attractions and the perversity of desire.
3. Red Velvet Rope
(up tempo Latin with bi-lingual rap) Brooks’ cautionary tale is set to a surging Cuban pulse by arranger Kiki Valera, offering a Technicolor snapshot of a scene rife with intoxicants and shady characters from the point of view of a young woman drawn to danger.
4. Over And Done
(ballad) A sumptuous, soul-bearing melody that captures the abject pain of lost love and abandonment, “Over & Done” is an exposed vein with no trace of sentimentality.
5. The Boy That Lived There
(anthem ballad) Set to soaring strains of gospel, this is a contemporary anthem about the devastation wrought when boys grow up without fathers, a tragedy playing out daily on the streets of Chicago.
6. Sixteen
(ballad) A lullaby that parents wish they could croon to their teenagers, “Sixteen” evokes the painful path of separation that adolescents walk on their way to adulthood.
7. The Flea Markets Of Paris
(ballad) Brimming with regret, burnished memories and well-observed details from daily life, “Flea Markets” is a polished gem of a rueful ballad that stings with truth.
8. Holding Back Tears
(ballad) Jacob’s supple string arrangement turns the ache up to 11 on Brooks’ anguished ballad about coping with the end of relationship.
9. Boogie Street
(gospel mid-tempo) Featuring John Walz, lead cellist for the Los Angeles Opera Company, Jeff Colella’s lithe and predatory arrangement brings out the mysterious erotic charge of Cohen and Robinson’s rarely covered song.