I’ll be perfectly frank with you-
I get so many albums by female vocalists, that at times I feel like I’m at on online dating service, just scrolling through faces and names…NEXT!
Then here comes this album by a lady I’ve never heard of, Aimee-Jo Benoit. She’s teamed up with a group called The New Assembly, consisting of a rich horn section of Carsten Rubeling/tb, Mark DeJong/ts-bcl and Andre Wicknheiser/tp and coaxed by a rhythm team of Daniel Gaucher/dr, Mark Limacher/p-key and Jon Wielebknowski/b. The charts are simply scrumptious, sometimes creating images of starry, starry nights and other moments forming strokes of dark shadows; it is a musical walk through a Night Gallery.
And Benoit’s voice is up to the task. There are hints of a young Joni Mitchell throughout in terms of cadence, range and dynamics, so it makes sense that she covers a couple of her tunes. With Limacher’s strong piano voicings, she tells a clear story through the Blue Noted horns on the post bop read of “Moon At The Window” and is in poetic mood as she glides over the moody bass and cymbals on the folkish “Little Green”. The elegiac horns give an impressionistic intro to a few of the pieces, with Benoit weaving in and out of them on the thoughtful “Barefoot” and gliding around WIkenheiser’s misty trumpet during “Bird On The Wire”. Fluffy horns gasp as Benoit pleads on “Where Will I Be” and DeJong’s bass clarinet creates a deep magma of tone on the film nourish “You Were Here”. Each lyric is handled with respect, and she makes each song her own. What more are you looking for in a vocalist? She’s fresh and all her own; when’s she hitting LA?!?