Madeleine Peyroux - Standing On The Rooftop (2011) FLAC

With her dusky, lyrical style and affinity for reinterpreting classic jazz,
blues, and folk standards, vocalist Madeleine Peyroux is a highly
acclaimed, internationally recognized artist. Emerging in her teens as a
street-busking performer in Paris' Latin Quarter in the 1980s, Peyroux drew
favorable comparisons to legendary jazz singer Billie Holiday, and
eventually caught the attention of the record industry. Her debut album,
1996's Dreamland, featured a bevy of noted jazz artists and drew accolades
for her distinctive take on blues and jazz standards.

In 2009, Madeleine Peyroux issued Bare Bones, her first recording of
all-original material with producer Larry Klein and a small group of jazz
musicians and co-composers. Standing on the Rooftop is her debut recording
for Decca with producer Craig Street. The group of players here is a
diverse lot: drummer Charlie Drayton, guitarists Christopher Bruce and Marc
Ribot, bassist Me'Shell Ndegeocello; John Kirby, Glenn Patscha, and Patrick
Warren alternate on keyboards, percussionist Mauro Refosco, violinist Jenny
Scheinman, and Allen Toussaint guests on piano.

The program is richly and elegantly painted with modern production touches
even as its songs are rooted in the historical past of classic Americana:
pop songs, blues, jazz, and sitting room tunes. It includes eight originals
and four covers, among them a poem by W.H. Auden set to music by Ribot
entitled "Lay Your Sleeping Head, My Love." The music is summery and
laid-back. The languid parlor-room reading of "Martha My Dear" by Lennon &
McCartney has a deliberate old-timey feel and twins well with "Fickle Dove"
(one of two Peyroux tunes written with Scheinman).

Robert Johnson's "Love in Vain," with its strange pump organ backdrop and
studio echo, indulges the kinds of production tricks Tom Waits might employ
in disguising a blues. That said, this song too has a twin of sorts in the
sonically similar title track; a clattering rag blues with ambient
electronics held in check by Peyroux's elegantly earthy vocal. Ribot's
acoustic guitar and Toussaint's upright on the Auden poem give the singer a
perfectly loose frame to create a song inside.

The thin, lean, funky blues on "The Kind You Can't Afford" (co-written with
former Rolling Stone Bill Wyman) and Bob Dylan's "I Threw It All Away" are
both slow shuffles and high points. In the latter, Peyroux's voice shifts
the lyric's meaning to where the implied bitterness gives way to
bewilderment. The album's final three cuts, "Meet Me in Rio," "Ophelia,"
and "The Way of All Things" make fine use of Peyroux's jazz chops; and
because of Street's production, make an exact time-space continuum
wonderfully imprecise.

As an album, Standing on the Rooftop may not be as striking as its
predecessor, but perhaps it wasn't meant to be. It is a seemingly effort
that pushes the familiar toward an uncertain future where pop genres cease
to need to exist at all.