Marcelle Gauvin - Faces of Love (1999)

In youth-driven idioms like alternative rock, dance-pop, and hip-hop, you don't find a lot of artists making their recording debuts at 45. But jazz is a different ball game. Jazz audiences tend to be more accepting of late bloomers because they realize that artists need to improve and develop with time; if an artist doesn't have a lot to say at 20 or 25, he/she might have plenty to say at 40, 45, or 50. In terms of recording, Marcelle Gauvin is one of jazz's late bloomers; the Massachusetts vocalist was 45 when she recorded her first album as a leader, Faces of Love. This competent, if unremarkable, debut shows Gauvin to be a likable singer with a charming, vulnerable quality to her voice. The singer picks a few warhorses that have been done to death over the years; do listeners really need to hear yet another conventional reading of "Love for Sale" or "Skylark"? But to her credit, she doesn't inundate us with songs that have been recorded hundreds of times, and she also embraces material that ranges from Heitor Villa-Lobos' "Eu Te Amo" (which finds her singing in Portuguese) to Ella Fitzgerald's "Rough Ridin'." And she certainly deserves applause for successfully tackling Stephen Sondheim's "Not While I'm Around"; many jazz vocalists steer clear of Sondheim's challenging compositions, but Gauvin, much to her credit, has enough vision to give "Not While I'm Around" a lightly Brazilian makeover. You won't find Faces of Love breathtaking, but it's respectable and lets us know that Gauvin is well worth keeping an eye on. © Alex Henderson