'love' (2015)

On his 35th album as a leader, pianist and composer David Benoit changed up his game. Remarkably, 2 in Love is the very first time in his long career that he's worked with a vocalist on an entire album. His chosen collaborator is Jane Monheit, one of the most celebrated mainstream jazz singers. All but one of these ten songs are originals co-written with three different lyricists: Lorraine Feather, Mark Winkler, and Spencer Day. Produced by the pianist, 2 in Love was cut live in the studio – a daunting prospect for most contemporary vocalists. But Monheit is no ordinary singer. Check her delivery on the knotty, Latin-tinged opener "Barcelona Nights." She glides through the changes and imbues her canny phrasing with just a hint of samba, with each articulated syllable entrenched in the song's groove. The sultry passion in her utterance is complemented beautifully by Pat Kelly's nylon-string guitar in the bridge. The title track is a swinging bossa with charging piano and hand percussion. Monheit has demonstrated throughout her career that her grasp on the form is both expert and soulful.

A brilliantly realized follow-up to her Grammy-nominated 2013 effort, WomanChild, vocalist Cécile McLorin Salvant's third album, 2015's For One to Love, is at its core a small-group jazz album featuring a thoughtfully curated set of standards and originals. However, with Salvant at the mike, backed here with nuanced skill by pianist Aaron Diehl, bassist Paul Sikivie, and drummer Lawrence Leathers, it's also a series of virtuoso performances, each one seemingly more engaging and emotionally resonant than the last. Conceptually centered around notions of romantic love – from conflicted, melancholic expressions to more bawdy, sensual ones – the album finds Salvant further demonstrating the poetic compositional skills and feminist themes that helped make WomanChild so much more than just a solid album from an accomplished jazz vocalist.