Sylvia Brooks - Sylvia Brooks Live With Christian Jacob (Live) (2023)

Since the release of her captivating debut, 2009’s Dangerous Liaisons, female jazz vocalist Sylvia Brooks has displayed a gift for inhabiting different personas, with a subspecialty in film-noir inspired femmes fatale. On her fourth jazz music album, Signature, she embraces the most challenging role of all, defining herself with a set of beautifully crafted original songs. Her evocative lyrics and emotionally direct delivery imbue the music with hard-won authenticity. Whether looking back with wry affection on her walk-on-the-wild-side youth or lamenting a lost love, Brooks brings bracing honesty and poise to the material. Like on her previous album, 2017’s The Arrangement, she’s keeping company with the Southland’s most creative accompanists. The stellar rhythm section tandem of drummer Ray Brinker and bassist Trey Henry on almost every track. And ace pianists Tom Ranier, Jeff Colella, and Christian Jacob designed beguiling, harmonically rich settings for her incisive lyrics. The cautionary tale “Red Velvet Rope” is a bit of a feint. It’s set to a sensuous Latin groove by cuatro master Kiki Valera, scion of a legendary Cuban musical clan. But aside from that Afro-Cuban jaunt, she’s swaying through swingtown, from the witty “Catch 22” to the passionately romantic “The Flea Markets of Paris.” The two jazz music songs she includes by other artists, Melody Gardot’s bluesy, organ-driven “Your Heart Is as Black as Night” and the Leonard Cohen/Sharon Robinson erotic lament “Boogie Street” seem to raise the temperature of her own work. Signature isn’t her maiden voyage as a songwriter. Brooks included three impressive originals on The Arrangement, but this album marks a quantum leap reflecting years of concentrated effort. “I really worked hard on trying to make the stories deeper and richer,” she says. “Each song is really a story within itself.”