Kathy Ingraham delivers a delightfully ambitious work with her latest collection, “Jazz Dreams.” On paper, a jazz vocal album built around rock classics like “Dream On,” “Ruby Tuesday,” and “Stairway to Heaven” could go badly wrong very fast. Instead, this record seems to find a genuine middle ground: familiar material, but recast with enough strangeness and emotional tact to make you hear it from a different angle.
What comes through most strongly is the album’s atmosphere. The whole project has a nocturnal, floating quality, which suits the title. Even when Ingraham is taking on songs that arrive with a lot of cultural baggage, the emphasis appears to be more on changing the light around them than radical reinvention.
“Dream On,” with Randy Brecker’s flugelhorn in the mix, opens the album in a wistful, reflective mood. The guest players seem to be used intelligently rather than decoratively, with Evan Christopher’s clarinet on “House of the Rising Sun,” and William Galison’s harmonica on “Stairway to Heaven,” are the highlights of arrangements built around color and contour.
https://kathyingraham.bandcamp.com/album/jazz-dreams
Kathy’s voice is central to why the album lands. She does not sound like a conventional jazz singer trying to prove her fluency in the tradition. Instead, she preserves the soul of the singles while maintaining her unique sense of character, and a slightly off-center dramatic instinct.
The two originals are probably where the album most clearly becomes Kathy Ingraham’s record rather than a clever songbook exercise. “Little Things Redux” is one of the emotional anchors of the set: spare, intimate, and unforced. “Melusina,” meanwhile, is the dreamiest piece here, and maybe the one that best justifies the album title.
https://www.kathyingraham.com/
What I like most about Jazz Dreams, based on the material available, is that it appears to understand restraint. This album trusts texture and pacing. It trusts the listener to recognize the songs while also letting them drift a little out of their original frames. Taken on its own terms, Jazz Dreams comes across as an imaginative and surprisingly coherent record. The appeal is likely strongest for listeners who like vocal jazz that’s personal, slightly eccentric, and more interested in atmosphere than orthodoxy.