Vocal Jazz

Waterloo, Dancing Queen or Voulez-vous. Famous, perhaps even played a bit too frequently. But what about Waterloo as a jazz ballad or Money, Money, Money in swing?

PMJ's latest batch of songs is so huge that one album was not enough to contain it! Hot on the heels of "Jazz Me Outside Part 1" comes the hotly anticipated sequel to this epic release! As with all the best #2s, "Jazz Me Outside Part 2" brings more of what you loved the first time around, only bigger and better.

Hailed by Jazziz magazine as the "voice of her generation" and a "national treasure," Chicago-born, Durham, North Carolina-based Dr Lenora Zenzalai Helm is a jazz vocal musician, composer, lyricist, bandleader, and a dedicated educator at North Carolina Central University (NCCU). Helm encompasses all of the inventions and dimensions of jazz and the African Diaspora on her new recording, Journeywoman, featuring her Tribe Jazz Orchestra Nonet. Helm's new CD, her eighth as a leader, is a compelling 65-minute, multi-movement 12-track work, where she sings about the life of an allegorical woman named Journey, and her struggles with abuse, birth, death, self-definition and her victories through self-love, perseverance, and affirmation.

New York improvising guitarist Bill Frisell recording with Dutch/Belgian chanteuse Chantal Acda (Sleepingdog) at the 2017 Jazz Middelheim Fest, in Antwerp, Belgium, which they agreed to do based on mutual satisfaction of their collaboration on Acda's studio album "Bounce Back" that year, resulting in a wonderfully compatible concert of rich and beautiful music.

"What A Wonderful World Of Jazz Singing" one would like to exclaim about the content of this gathering of 21 top jazz singers and their recordings made between 1946 and 1962. A musical spectrum spreads out that comes across as dazzling and multi-layered as these singing personalities, who come from all sources of the infamous American melting pot and have driven their roots deep into all ingredients of American popular music: into the blues of the Mississippi and the metropolises, the swing of the Jazz Age and the black ghettos and the New York ballrooms, the effervescent bebop and the cool jazz of the Californian West Coast…

The songs this time out are an eclectic grab bag, ranging from a '60-style orchestral pop cover of a '90s grunge classic ("Smells Like Teen Spirit") to a '40s swing rendition of a paranoid '80s MTV hit ("Who Can It Be Now") to Mario Jose and India Carney subbing for Ed Sheeran and Beyoncé on "Perfect Duet" - and upping the stakes with a guest shot by sax star Dave Koz! There's also our eerie cinematic read of Gnarls Barkley's "Crazy," a soulful Italian redo of Andrea Bocelli's "The Prayer," and - finally - our take on Europe’s immortal "The Final Countdown" for anyone who's wanted a more throwback style for their Segway-mounted magic shows! (There's got to be some "Arrested Development" fans out there, right? Right?) All that and a bunch more surprises - with a second batch coming hot on its heels! How Bow Dah?

In the mid-1950s and early 1960s, the great Anita O’Day recorded several glorious albums for jazz entrepreneur and producer Norman Granz, among them some of the most celebrated of her long career. The LP The Jazz Stylings of Anita O’Day (Verve VLP 9125), presented here in its entirety, consists of a selection of the best songs from those years, and finds her in the company of great jazz soloists and conductors. Eight additional tracks from the same period have been included as a bonus to the original album.

'Too Hot For Words' blends the tight-knit swing of the Metropolitan Jazz Octet with the unerring musicianship of Dee Alexander to mark the 60th anniversary of Billie Holiday's departure from the planet, mixing Holiday classics with some of Lady Day's lesser- known repertoire. The arrangements sparkle, and Alexander shines as bright as ever. But at no point does she attempt to mimic Holiday. (What would be the point of that)? And the arrangements don't try to imitate the little 'orchestras' that accompanied Holiday's greatest recordings. (No point in that either.) These new settings respect the songs, but reframe them for our era. The album becomes a sort of telescoping time capsule: sterling musicians of the 21st century, building upon an octet sound crafted 50 years earlier, revitalizing songs that Holiday began recording in the 1930s.