Kat Edmonson

Austin-based singer/songwriter Kat Edmonson has built a cult following around her cherubic, jazz-inflected songs. And while she has always utilized the colorful harmonies and clever lyrical melodies of jazz and American popular song, at her core she's a jazz-influenced pop artist, and this album finds her embracing those sensibilities more than ever. If Edmonson's 2012 sophomore album, Way Down Low, found her moving even further afield from the cabaret jazz of 2009's Take to the Sky, then 2014's The Big Picture reveals another evolution toward an all-original approach to making music.

Austin-based singer/songwriter Kat Edmonson has built a cult following around her cherubic, jazz-inflected songs. And while she has always utilized the colorful harmonies and clever lyrical melodies of jazz and American popular song, at her core she's a jazz-influenced pop artist, and this album finds her embracing those sensibilities more than ever. If Edmonson's 2012 sophomore album, Way Down Low, found her moving even further afield from the cabaret jazz of 2009's Take to the Sky, then 2014's The Big Picture reveals another evolution toward an all-original approach to making music.

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…

Tom Waits turns 70 years old in December. And shortly before that, Dualtone Music Group is celebrating his work with the release of Come On Up To The House: Women Sing Waits, a tribute compilation featuring new renditions of his songs from a number of female artists including Phoebe Bridgers, Aimee Mann, Rosanne Cash, Corinne Bailey Rae, and more. The album was produced by artist, author, and composer Warren Zanes.