Want to stump your friends on a blindfold test? Give a sample Polly Gibbons’ singing on this live-in-studio album. First, your friends are not going to think that she’s even white-she has a soulful and sassy tone and deliver that hints of Gladys Knight, and then if you ask what country she’s from, I guarantee you that NO ONE will pick jolly old England, but these are the facts.
This album has her belting it out with Tamir Hendelman-James Pearson/p, Shedrick Mitchell/B3, Paul Bollenback/g, Richie Goods/g and Mark McLean, with the pianists trading off the arranging chores. Her grit and sass come out from the get go with the funky soul of Horace Silver’s “Permit Me To Introduce You to Yourself” as she does both vocalese and gospel lyrics. She drenches “Good Hands Tonight” with BBQ sauce with a Memphis rub and gets into a Crescent City groove on a Sunday Morning take of “Anything Goes.”
But she’s anything but one dimensional, she is harrowingly tender with Pearson as she carries a torch on the soft “If You Had The Chance” and wisps and aches with guitar and bass as she drifts like windswept drapes on “This Is Always,” slinking to her own “All I Can Do” and crystalline for “Nothing Compares to You.” Still, she knows her way around the swamp, and she stomps out pieces like “Sugar In My Bowl” and a funky “I’m Just A Lucky So and So” like she was weaned at Central BBQ. When’s she next in So Cal?!?