Claire Martin & Richard Rodney Bennett - Witchcraft (2011) [SACD]

Claire Martin & Richard Rodney Bennett have taken their creative partnership to the next level with this album. Bennett’s elegant playing & distinguished style fuse beautifully with the vocals of Britain’s 1st Lady of Jazz.
This album contains a thoughtful selection of songs from the Cy Coleman songbook. Together, this collection weaves together the opposing talents of the sultry jazz sensation Claire Martin & the polished, savvy keyboard skills & compositional insight of Richard Rodney Bennett.
Martin’s strength as 1 of the best interpreters of the Great American Songbook shines through in this recording. The smoky elegance of her vocal sculpts itself around the smooth flowing textures of the piano accompaniment & the occasional vocal repartee of Bennett. The result of this established partnership is mesmerising music that takes you back to a wonderful & simpler time of yesteryear.

LondonJazzNews:
Since their 1st meeting in Glasgow in the early 1990s, singer Claire Martin & composer/pianist Richard Rodney Bennett have been what Martin calls ‘firm friends’, their relationship cemented by a common interest in the subtleties of songwriting & jazz singing, not to mention cigarettes & vodka.
On this album, they perform as a (delightfully informal but consistently musicianly) duo, her intimate, deceptively unfussy vocal style perfectly complemented by his flawlessly eloquent piano. Their material is all mined from the Cy Coleman songbook, his celebrated classics (‘The Best is Yet to Come’, ‘Witchcraft’) interspersed with less celebrated but none the less touching, wry love songs (‘Sometime When You’re Lonely’, ‘Nobody Does It Like Me’) & the odd snappy social satire (the Lehreresque Ev’rybody Today is Turning On’, co-written by Michael Mike Stewart, brother of celebrated folk singer/songwriter John).
Martin might have been specially created to interpret these self-deprecating, witty but poignant songs, her ostensibly conversational delivery underpinned by firm adherence to all the classic jazz-singing essentials: crystal-clear diction, a sophisticated sense of swing, a keen intelligence able to wring every last drop of significance from the sharpest lyric. Bennett, too, though not a singing virtuoso, has an affecting, attractively lived-in voice, & so the pair’s duets are entertaining & emotive, & the album as a whole is, as 1 recent reviewer commented, ‘wise & cultivated … altogether satisfying’.

JazzTimes:
When Britain’s foremost jazz singer meets the island’s most imaginative composer, the outcome is always stellar. When their latest pairing is constructed entirely around selections from the Cy Coleman songbook, the results are that much more spectacular. Bennett is more prominent throughout, providing elegantly insightful piano accompaniment on all 14 tracks, taking vocal lead on 4 & duetting with Martin on 4 more. Martin’s solo vocals are, befitting her interpretive dexterity, wider ranging, extending from the tender heartache of “I’m Gonna Laugh You Right Out of My Life” & “With Every Breath I Take” to the sardonic self-berating of “Nobody Does It Like Me” & the romantically insouciant “When in Rome.”
Best, however, are the duets. When her smokiness wraps itself around his gruff growl, the results evoke the vivacious sophistication of Julie Wilson & her longtime playmate William Roy (who, back in 2000, also paid lively tribute to Coleman). Martin & Bennett take a gleeful stroll through “Ev’rybody Today Is Turning On,” Coleman’s slyly cross-generational salute to recreational substances. But their harmonic virtuosity is even better explored across “The Best Is Yet to Come,” “The Rules of the Road” & the title track, their dazzling thrust & parry ingeniously choreographed.