Jasna Bilušić, New Deal - Fifty Ways... (2012)

Jasna Bilušić has been around the Croatian music scene for a long time, where she demonstrated her great singing and interpretation skills a long time ago. With a small group of collaborators, she recorded " Fifty Ways... " where she once again confirmed her great vocal abilities.
With the accompanying band The New Deal, she managed to perform interesting readings of world jazz standards as well as the famous song from Jadranka Stojaković's repertoire "Što te nema". The final result is certainly comparable to similar projects from abroad.
There are minimalistic arrangements, only the essentials are played, there is no stretching of the material. Hits from the eighties, " Like A Virgin " by the self-deprecating singer Madonna, and " Time After Time " by Cindy Lauper were also included in the playlist. It's a bit schizophrenic that Van Morrison's " Moondance " and Paul Simon's " 50 Ways To Leave Your Lover " are on the same record, but Jasna's voice does everything to make the coexistence of such different songs bearable.
"Fifty Ways..." is music for the bedroom, but not for falling asleep from boredom. We are talking about inspired performances, flawlessly crafted, which benefit from the 'less is more' approach, that is, this 'less is more' approach contributes to the originality of Jasna's artistic vision. After all, both Jasna and her friends are seasoned musicians, so they won't allow themselves to slip up on low-quality performances.
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The disadvantage is the absence of even greater originality and perhaps the selection of songs that are more similar in their sensibilities, so then it would be convenient to apply interpretive procedures of 'breathing new life' to those songs that form a rounded story by themselves.
The biggest blessing and biggest problem of the album is the performance of the song " Što te nema ", which steals the show with its emotionality and depth, however, it does not belong in this jazz story. "Sto te nema" suggests that Jasna and her small company are competent to go a few steps further and take on even more risks, so that instead of a more than solid jazz record, they offer a dizzying, unpredictable and impossible for average talented musicians fusion of jazz and sevdah (which would just worked for Damir Imamović to come to visit them?).
Jasna Bilušić and her band have enough talent to deal with something like that and to create a successful and original combination of sevdah and jazz. For domestic standards, "Fifty Ways..." is a four, for foreign standards it is a three. Bilušić sounds 'too western' for these parts, and not exotic enough for the West.