Several notable contemporary vocalists are informed and inspired by jazz, and work with jazz musicians but stretch beyond certain traditional boundaries. Here’s a taste of their work.

Maria Muldaur

One of popular music’s great sojourners Muldaur began as a vocalist and fiddler in the Jim Kweskin & the Jug Band, and and in a duo act with her first husband Geoff Muldaur, before beginning a formidable solo career in 1973. Though she sang swing and Dixieland songs on several Warner/Reprise albums in the 1970s in the 1980s she started recording jazz-oriented sets in 1983.

Sweet and Slow (1983), Jazzabelle (1993), Meet Me Where They Play the Blues (1999), A Woman Alone with the Blues: Remembering Peggy Lee (2003; CD), Love Wants to Dance (2004; CD), Don’t You Feel My Leg (2018), and Let’s Get Happy Together (2021) are all well-executed albums of interest for jazz fans.

Her most notable contribution to jazz is her blues trilogy released on Stony Plain Records from 2001-07 including Richland Woman Blues (2001), Sweet Lovin’ Ol Soul (2005), and Naughty, Bawdy & Blue (2007). Richland and Sweet explore classic and country blues in the vein of Bessie Smith and Memphis Minnie and overlooked performers like Minnie’s collaborations with Kansas Joe McCoy. Naughty, recorded with James Dapogny’s Chicago Jazz Band, is a brassy swing reflecting the urbanization of the blues in the 1920s.

Bonus: In 1986 she recorded the delightful album Transblucency for the Canadian label Uptown Records. It has yet to be digitized but is worth a listen if you can find it on vinyl!

Madeleine Peyroux

Hardcore jazz lovers often dismiss pop music as too simplistic, repetitive, and/or commercial to warrant serious listening. Since gaining national attention in the mid-1990s for her sultry Billie Holiday like voice Peyroux has longed straddled the boundaries of pop, folk, and jazz in search of a sound. She has recorded two eclectic masterpieces, 2016’s Secular Hymns and 2018’s Anthem, that demonstrate an uncommon mastery of popular song forms. On Hymns she places the songs of Rosetta Tharpe, Allen Toussaint, Tom Waits, Willie Dixon, and Stephen Foster in conversation and the result is sublime. On Anthem she and her bandmates distill the lessons from Hymns into a set of mostly original material that feels like a new chapter of popular song somehow undefinable yet best described as popular music in the best since: melodic, thoughtful, accessible and fun to listen to repeatedly.

Lizz Wright

When you record for the Verve record label, include songs by Oscar Brown Jr. and Chick Corea on your debut, and work with jazz musicians, people naturally assume you fit into their prefabricated jazz box. Listening closely to Lizz Wright’s 2003 debut Salt, however, reveals how she has always employed jazz as an ingredient in a richer stew of music. Possessing a rich, creamy voice and adept at drawing out new colors in even the most familiar of songs she is one of popular music’s great synthesizers. Gospel is deeply central to her art as are aspects of classical music technique and jazz.  

2005’s Dreaming Wide Awake showcases the best balance of her original tunes and material drawn from the jazz and rock canons among her earliest albums. Songs like “I’m Confessin’” and “Get Together” are sung with an unusual dewiness and intensity. 2010’s Fellowship is a spirited nod to the American black gospel tradition with unexpected integrations of Gladys Knight & the Pips, Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix, and Angelique Kidjo alongside traditional spirituals. Brilliant, even for secularists. Her most recent album 2017’s aptly named Grace parallels the way Cassandra Wilson summoned a range of North American popular musical energies on her 1993 classic Blue Light Til’ Dawn. Wright finds common musical ground in the voices of k.d. lang, Allen Toussaint, Bob Dylan, and the Reverend Thomas Dorsey, in a way that presents infinite possibilities for how to interpret disparate material seamlessly and soulfully.

Esperanza Spalding

Spalding may have surprised many when she won the 2010 Best New Artist Grammy over more well-known pop acts but the bassist, vocalist, and composer was already respected in the jazz community as a wunderkind on the bass, having debuted as a leader on 2006’s Junjo and been appointed as an Instructor at Berklee School of Music at 20. After releasing Esperanza and Chamber Music Society on the Heads Up label she switched to Concord where her music gained an even bigger audience. Influenced by jazz, hip-hop, different strains of Latin pop, and soul music 2012’s Radio Music Society earned her a Grammy for Jazz Vocal Album and previewed the conceptual artist she was becoming. Radio comprised mostly of soulful originals including the anthemic “Black Gold” featured videos for each song elevating it from an album to an audio and visual narrative experience.

On 2016’s Emily D+Evolution electric guitar and funk and rock rhythms play a more prominent role than her previous jazz, soul, and Latin pop approach. The result is a daring departure that reflects the artist’s desire to push herself and the kind of album that might attract a different kind of listener to Spalding’s music.  She continued pushing these stylistic boundaries on 2018’s 12 Little Spells.

A Fascinating playlist: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7FHQR4lej8Tzr3Bn6WCg60?si=725f1d64cca84505

COPYRIGHT © 2021 VINCENT L. STEPHENS. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.