Kat Caulberg

Branching away from standards on her second album Way Down Low, Austin-based jazz vocalist Kat Edmonson also expands her musical worldview, going beyond the sophisticated cabaret of her 2009 debut Take to the Sky and creating a breezy neo-tribute to the swinging '60s. That was the decade that produced Brian Wilson's "I Just Wasn't Made for These Times," one of the few covers on Way Down Low and a sentiment that applies to Edmonson but in a different way. Where the Beach Boy was pining for the days before rock & roll, Edmonson would certainly feel more comfortable in either the '60s or '50s, where bossa nova, swing, and pop mingled happily, as they do here.

Old Fashioned Gal, the title of Kat Edmonson's fourth record, certainly describes the singer. Edmonson doesn't truck with modern styles, whether they're musical or technological, but that doesn't mean she's stuck in the past. She's working an older style – one that's rooted in the first half of the 20th century – but she's adding to tradition by writing a set of original songs that blend modern lyrical sensibilities with the style of the Great American Songbook. It's a sly, subtle accent on a record that could be mistaken for an old-fashioned LP – the music and the arrangements are intimate, yet lush; the tempo is never hurried, which gives Edmonson plenty of time to luxuriate in her melodies – and that helps give this cabaret music an air of welcome freshness.

With her delightful but unsettling mix of whimsy and earnest irony, Kat Edmonson is a vocalist who can get inside your head and keep you up at night. Her fifth album, Dreamers Do, offers a bracing antidote to sleepless nights, as she’s scoured Disney soundtracks for songs about dreams, slumber, and the anxieties that ruffle our pillows. Rather than serving as a soporific, it’s a seductive sojourn that alternately lulls and surprises.
Although nominally a concept album about soothing oneself through an angst-filled evening, Dreamers Do is held together more by Edmonson’s fey aesthetic and small, pliable, Blossom Dearie-esque voice than any thematic through line…