The Two of Us

At the midpoint of her show with guitarist Diego Figueiredo on Sept. 27 at Cleveland's Nighttown, singer Cyrille Aimée pulled out her loop pedal and set about constructing the rhythmic and harmonic vocal tracks that would form the pulsing, multilayered foundation for a French-lyric song of her own composition. The wordless backing, with its beat-box bump and skip, had as much to do with hip-hop as jazz, as would much of the scatting on the other songs the duo performed this night—chestnuts such as "Old Devil Moon" and "Night In Tunisia," and Brazilian and French music standards, plus original compositions. Unlike the rollercoaster melodic flights of much scatting, Aimée often settled into blues-like repetition held within a limited tonal range—a rhythmic effect offset by stretched open vowels and, yes, snippets of more conventional…