(Vocal jazz) Carolyn Leonhart & Wayne Escoffery - Tides Of Yesterday - 2010, MP3, 320 kbps

Vocalist Carolyn Leonhart and saxophonist Wayne Escoffery are a young husband-and-wife team, and Tides of Yesterday is their second recorded partnership. And a partnership it is, because this CD (as the liner notes say) is not about a "vocalist with a band or a band with a guest vocalist." Leonhart's sultry and expressive voice acts, at times, as another instrument, contributing scatting and wordless vocals. Both have worked with the band members—Toru Dodo (acoustic and electric piano), Hans Glawischnig (bass), Donald Edwards (drums), Jeff Haynes (percussion) and Adam Rogers (guitar)—over the years, so the interplay between all of them is tight and intuitive.
The material includes choices from the standard songbook, jazz classics and three originals with lyrics by Leonhart. The jazz classic standout is Charles Mingus' "Eclipse" (a piece Escoffery plays regularly with the Mingus Orchestra and Big Band), capturing the eerie, moody feeling of the solar phenomenon with the sensitivity of Leonhart's lyric reading and Rogers' playing. Notable also is a bluesy "Sometimes I'm Happy," where Leonhart and Escoffery feature a call-and-response section and some blistering saxophone work. But perhaps the real highlight is "Big Noise, New York," a good song by Donald Fagen (of Steely Dan fame, Leonhart being part of that band's touring ensemble). The reading grabs the attention from the opening moments to the long fadeout, with Leonhart's richly textured voice and Escoffery's energetic fills.
Whether it be for the individual talents of Leonhart, Escoffery and their band mates, their interactions, or the arrangements of the material, more than one listen is needed to appreciate the entire musical tapestry here.

That Carolyn Leonhart can hold her own as a superlative vocalist is undeniable. Indeed, she demonstrated so a couple of years back on Chances Are, her sweet, gentle tribute to underappreciated composer Robert Allen, and on her hard-to-find, Japan-only release, Autumn in New York, from 2003. But Leonhart’s vocal prowess is, as has been the case on two previous albums, exponentially increased when she is paired with her equally gifted saxophonist husband, Wayne Escoffery.
The pair opens with “Better Next Time.” Not to be confused with Irving Berlin’s melancholy “Better Luck Next Time,” this familial effort (written by Escoffery and Leonhart with her brother Michael) is a thoughtful excavation of tough lessons learned. Four standards follow, including a cleverly conceived “The Sweetest Sounds” that unfolds like an interior monologue; a pensive “Never Never Land” as unhurried as a slow-passing cloud; a tranquilly gratified “Sometimes I’m Happy”; and, most ingeniously, a seemingly snowbound “You Must Believe in Spring” that, for once, appreciates how the song speaks to the promise of spring.
Exceptional as all four are, they pale in comparison to the album’s latter half, where Leonhart plays seductress to Escoffery’s sorcerer on a gauzy, near-Eastern treatment of Mingus’ “Eclipse”; sax and voice swap wails on a dense, bluesy reading of Donald Fagen’s “Big Noise, New York”; the couple boards the express train of Leonhart’s romantically urgent “Straight to You (Baloo Baloo)”; and they finish with a vibrantly abstract treatment of Lee Morgan’s “Infinity.”

Carolyn Leonhart – vocals
Wayne Escoffery - tenor and soprano saxophones
Toru Dodo - piano and Fender Rhodes
Adam Rogers - guitar (2,7)
Hans Glawschnig – bass
Donald Edwards – drums
Jeff Haynes - percussion (2,6,7,10)