Lisa Rich’s Stunning New Album

LONG AS YOU’RE LIVING / Long As You’re Living (Priester-Turrentine-Brown). Throw It Away (Abby Lincoln). When I Look in Your Eyes (Bricusse-Harrison). New Morning Blues (Clayton-Granelli). Lonely Woman (Silver-Feather). Isotope (Henderson-Kuhn). A Timeless Place [The Peacock] (Rowles-Winstone). Jitterbug Waltz (Waller-Grean-Manners-H. Jones). Close Your Eyes (Bernice Petkere). Ask Me Now (Monk-Hendricks). Bye Bye Blackbird (Henderson-Dixon). Haperchance/Drifting Dreaming (Clayton/Satie-Don Read) / Lisa Rich, voc; Dave Ballou, tp; Marc Copland, pno; Drew Gress, bs / Tritone Records 003

Most jazz fans know Lisa Rich’s story by now. In the 1980s and early ‘90s, she had a good career going as an up-and-coming jazz singer, but a long-term illness sidetracked her career. It took years for her to fully recoup, but over the past few years she has re-emerged on CD (Highwire, 2019), and this is her latest.

Rich is not quite on the same level as Ella Fitzgerald, Anita O’Day or Cleo Laine, but compared to most of today’s whispering ballad chickie-poohs, she is a towering figure in jazz. She swings with an infectiously light beat, she uses outstanding musicians for her back-up bands, and she can create brilliant if brief scat solos. Probably due to her illness, she does not sing “out” very strongly—she is close to the mike, and uses fine gradations of volume within a fairly narrow compass—but she is such a great artist that she puts herself on a par with the great Sheila Jordan.

I think what separates Rich most from the pack is that light feeling for rhythm, which she insists on her bandmates playing behind her. No matter what the tempo (the opening song is in a relaxed 6/8) Rich and her musical partners lay down a beat that just won’t quit. In addition, their relaxed approach engenders excellent solos, on this track particularly from pianist Marc Copland, and every so often Rich scats impressively considering her age and vocal resources. In short, she is HIP.

Bassist Drew Gress opens Throw it Away with a nice, relaxed improvised intro, and Rich hangs back on the beat when singing that speaks volumes as to how completely she has absorbed jazz feeling. Copland’s solo on this track is played a cappella, and I think the omission of drums helps sustain the feeling of intimacy that is one of Rich’s hallmarks. She and her highly skilled band are the kind of musicians who can keep the intensity level down without sacrificing a real jazz feeling; even in a ballad like When I Look Into your Eyes they hold your interest because they are musicians conveying a jazz feeling, even though ballads are not my thing. Listen, for instance, how Rich subtly stretches the time on the line “the deepness of the sea.” This is truly subtle artistry. Another good example is the way she and Copland, singing the wordless theme of New Morning Blues together, add space between the notes before she takes off on a very good scat improvisation with just piano and bass behind her.

Trumpeter Ballou returns for five of the last seven tracks, and both he and Rich are excellent on Joe Henderson’s Isotope and Ask Me Now. Pianist Copland follows their lead and also plays excellent solos. Her reading of the lyrics of A Timeless Place is almost Zen-like, and she completely revamps Fats Waller’s olf Jitterbug Waltz in a way that I would never have imagined. And surprisingly, Ballou plays open horn on this track (he was muted on the previous two), a nice minimalist solo with some Chet Baker overtones. Copland and Gress are also excellent here.

Some of Rich’s phrasing on Close Your Eyes is very similar to the work of Sheila Jordan. Both Rich and Copland gear their solos to emphasize the feeling of falling chromatics, which gives the whole piece a strangely sad vibe despite the uptempo and mostly major-key setting. And listen to the way she arches her phrases across the meter in her sensitive rendition of Monk’s Ask Me Now, a track that includes another outstanding open Ballou solo.

Her vocal resources may be diminished by age and illness, but Lisa Rich is better than just a “jazz stylist.” She is a true artist who gets deeply under the skin of the music she sings and turns even such an old chestnut as Bye Bye Blackbird into a jazz masterpiece. And if that weren’t enough, the last track, opening with her mentor Jay Clayton’s bitonal piece Haperchance, finds her singing some truly avant-garde lines on a par with Sophie Dunér before morphing into a jazz reimagining of Erik Satie’s famous Gymnopedie No. 1. You simply have to hear this record to believe it.

—© 2024 Lynn René Bayley

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