Ashley Pezzotti's We've Only Just Begun

I keep mentioning the trends in contemporary jazz, but I'm never sure if they're real trends of just my hyped-up and insular reaction to the way I receive the latest music releases. To me, it always seems like they arrive in genre groups--big band, tango, free jazz, female voice, etc. Over the last couple of weeks we've circled back to women jazz singers tackling the Great American Songbook, and I have quite a few to review. Many of these singers employ the same approach--they surround themselves with the best musicians and then let their voices do the...er, talking. I'm starting off with Ashley Pezzotti and her new album We've Only Just Begun because she's sort of a touchstone for what follows. She has a classic jazz voice from the sweet and angelic side of the street, and the arrangements of her quartet are honorable, precise and authentic.

Yesterday I wrote another review for Part-Time Audiophile which will appear in a couple of days, one of those vault discoveries that's been hiding out for fifty years from singer Jeanne Lee. Lee took so many chances, and her vocals are challenging because they deconstruct the norms of the jazz chanteuse. Pezzotti represents the opposite tack since she's someone who can take you back to a time where sheer beauty was valued beyond all else in jazz. Both styles are valid, and you need one to appreciate the other. But that aforementioned sweetness is what gets to me when I listen to Pezzotti's voice, a pure sound full of that elusive inner light, all without attempts to do something that has never been done before. Crossing frontier lines is noble, but there are simply times when you want to stay home and be comfortable and feel loved.

If I remove all the flowery language and big words, I find that I'm smitten with her voice. At just 23 years old, Pezzotti still knows how to find the joy in songs such as, well...here's the thing. Many of these songs are not from the GAS, but "inspired" by them. That's Pezzotta's one-two punch, that she wrote many of these songs and made them sound just like those jazz standards. In a way, she tricked me, and I'm impressed. It's her voice that sells this idea, however, that she's smart enough to make old guys like me feel dumb. Are you sure you're only 23? It takes an old soul to create this type of magic.

When I looked further into her quartet I expected a bunch of old vets, ones who could help her cast this spell. To my surprise, these four--sax player Alex Weitz, pianist Emmet Cohen, bassist Bob Bruya and drummer Kyle Poole--look young as well. I shouldn't keep focusing on youth, even though the album's title seems to emphasize it. Perhaps the clue is in Pezzotta's childhood where she started voice lessons at the age of four. That means she's going on twenty years of experience, which provides a much better perspective for the richness of her delivery. When performers this young are this seasoned, it's satisfying to know that they have decades of music-making in their future, and we can all sit back and enjoy the simple pleasure of beautiful music. That is, in essence, the joy of jazz.