27 July 2009
Jazzwise
Alan Shypton


Few singers have made as big an impact in so short a time as 27-year old Gwyneth Herbert, whose major label albums with Universal and Blue Note are now behind her. Whereas Bittersweet and Blue (Universal) tackled standards and a few originals with conventional jazz or big band backings, and Between Me And The Wardrobe (Blue Note) adopted Seb Rochford-produced minimalist settings, it's taken until now for her to create her own personal aesthetic. With the exception of a David Bowie cover as the album's ‘hidden track', everything here is her own work as songwriter, producer and performer. She remains hard to classify stylistically, although the sublime ‘Some Days I Forget' is an out-and-out jazz song, but unclassifiability has not inhibited her creativity, nor the invention of people and places in lyrics and music that linger in the imagination.

The free-flowing ‘Annie's Yellow Bag' (whose lyrics give the album its title) has the feel of a live gig, with Herbert's band creating a shifting background behind the storytelling lyrics, including handclaps and impromptu percussion. Contrastingly, ‘Mi Mini and Me' with Al Cherry's incisive bottleneck guitar is reminiscent of early Cassandra Wilson, while moments of bowed bass and pizzicato violin give the melancholy lyrics of ‘Nataliya', a subconscious ‘Eleanor Rigby' resonance. Such echoes of other artists apart, ‘All The Ghosts' is the assertion of a highly personal musical voice, perfectly epitomised by ‘Jane Into A Beauty Queen' with shifting metres, contrasting backgrounds, and lyrics that actually mean something.