No reason to alter my opinion. Reviewing her previous album, my comment “Emma Smith is a well-seasoned jazz singer with an abundance of chops” stands resolute. Her new album, ‘Hat-Trick!’ confirms my faith in her talent, virtuosity, originality, humour and passion is justified. And, please, enthusiastic applause for her skilful trio, Samuel Watts on piano, Joe Lee, bass and Luke Tomlinson, drums, all participants in the shared arranging duties.
At the very start, Ms Smith shuns convention by opening the album with a waltz. However, it’s a snappy waltz. Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick’s Matchmaker, Matchmaker from the 1964 musical, Fiddler On The Roof, a heartfelt appeal to the shetl shadchan (Yiddish for ‘village marriage consultant’), to find her a suitable mate, showcasing her finely honed senses of drama and dynamics.
Jule Styne and Sammy Cahn wrote Saturday Night Is The Loneliest Night Of The Week in 1944 so that Frank Sinatra could increase the incidence of swooning among bobby-soxers. Smith and Lee state the theme in a vocal/bass staccato duet with Watts providing Basie accents before all four launch themselves into headlong swing.
Delving into long-forgotten repertoire, Smith repurposes an unfamiliar 1957 Patti Page vehicle, Old Cape Cod, written by Claire Rothrock, Milton Yakus and Allan Jeffrey, with beautifully controlled vibrato and maintaining an intimate relationship with the microphone over a slow and sinuous Latin beat.
Still on the revival trail, Ms Smith refreshes yet another Sinatra smash, yet again with Sammy Cahn lyrics, (Love Is) The Tender Trap, melody by Jimmy Van Heusen (the composer who borrowed his surname from a brand of shirt). Levitating over an insinuating rhythm, she unabashedly flaunts her native heritage, even when interpreting the most stars-and-stripey U.S. lyrics, she plumps for Home County received pronunciation vowels, for instance ‘laugh-ing’ rather than ‘laffing’. Similarly, in the samba-inflected, decidedly boozy (mentioning champagne, sparkling burgundy brew and a julep or two) You Go To My Head, written by J. Fred Coots and Haven Gillespie, we hear ‘glahss’ and ‘cahn’t’. She also sings ‘chahnce’ which poses a slight problem as it’s supposed to rhyme with ‘romance’. On the other hand, she also manages to sustain the simple word ‘eyes’ over four delicious notes.
Once upon a time, Rube Bloom and Johnny Mercer’s Day In Day Out (‘the ocean’s roar, a thousand drums’) was the go-to belter for opening any high-energy Vegas or TV musical extravaganza. But not for this album, where the trio establishes a catchy vamp at a less frenetic tempo and Smith delivers a more considered version with a sprightly chorus from Samuel Watts.
On a mid-1950s Verve album, the unparalleled Anita O’Day established the husky template for David Mann and Redd Evans’ No Moon At All. 70-odd years later, Smith applies a fresh perspective by mixing it with the rhythms and adding her own brand of vocal gymnastics for the 2020s.
Around 1941, Billy Strayhorn, Duke Ellington’s distinguished partner in composition, was so gobsmacked by ‘Nocturne: Blue and Gold’, James McNeill Whistler’s painting of a bridge over the Thames, that he wrote a chromatic jazz masterpiece called Chelsea Bridge (apologies on being a pedant, but the image was actually Old Battersea Bridge). About a decade later, Bill Comstock of the Four Freshmen vocal quartet added sub-adequate lyrics but Emma Smith puts everything to rights by enveloping the glorious melody and its vertiginous leaps in her rich contralto register.
A couple of time and romance classics follow. With no disrespect to Cole Porter’s Night And Day from 1932, Smith and the trio refit the song with an Errol Garner bounce, investing fresh vigour. And, for Rodgers and Hart’s 1937 Where Or When, possibly the greatest song about memory confusion, Smith adds lashings of breathy drama.
Finally, the melody on this album with the longest pedigree is Sam Stept’s Don’t Sit Under The Apple Tree, once an Andrew Sisters’ effort to spur the G.I.s in World War II. Involving a request for chastity over the duration, it uncannily resembles Long, Long Ago, a 19th Century folk song although, back in those times, it would have lacked the-driving four-on-the-floor Basie groove.
‘Hat-Trick!’ was captured in its overall fidelity at Livingstone Studios and mixed by Daniel Mount. Indubitably a clahss act.
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