Julie Hardy
The Wish
World Culture Music
True confessions: Slower scat singing and lyricless vocals generally bring out my inner giggling middle-school student. I'm not proud of it, but there it is.
Yet it took jazz singer-composer Julie Hardy all of about 20 seconds to stare down that little adenoidal smirker and seduce and marvel him with her gentle but sure voice, concise intonation, calm conviction, and enticing, angular tunes, harmonies, and arrangements. Of course, it helps that she's playing with some top talents on Kendrick Scott's World Culture Music--including drummer Scott himself--who seem to get and join Hardy thoroughly.
Hardy's not lyric-phobic, and understands their power, but she also experiments with voice as instrument in a relaxed but highly disciplined way. A New Hampshire native, Hardy studied at the University of New Hampshire and the New England Conservatory, and made her CD debut in 2003 with A Moment's Glance. Her 13 tracks here combine her own compositions with standards from Rodgers and Hammerstein, Styne and Cahn, Lawrence and Altman, Warren and Gordon, and the Beatles, plus a Wayne Shorter tune to which she added words. She manages to respect the material she covers while cleverly reimagining it, for instance, taking Lennon and McCartney's "I'm Looking Through You" and turning it into a slightly surreal bewildered triplet-measured search within the lover for a love that has fled.
Hardy says Shorter's Speak No Evil greatly influenced her composing, and in "Song of the Iris," she adds lyrics that voice the tune's inquisitives, and here and elsewhere, her vocals glide into and off Jaleel Shaw's alto sax in some beautiful play and interplay. Maybe it's because of her early experiences listening to Shorter, but Hardy seems to have a special affinity for dueting with saxophone, both Shaw's and Sam Sadigursky's tenor and soprano. Her range, her tone, and her mostly vibratoless delivery work especially well in that context.
On a few tracks, she's accompanied by the exceptional guitarist Ben Monder, whose silken strumming and exquisite voicing are deeply sensitive to Hardy's delivery. Pianist Randy Ingram, bassist Matt Cohesy, and Scott on drums are a superb rhythm section. They solo wonderfully (I love Clohesy's lyrical turn, for example, on Hardy's "Patience"). But together they also form a sublimely elastic temporal and textural landscape for Hardy to traverse. Scott's drumming is simply some of the most thoughtful and sensitive I've heard. He has a deceptively low-key and quiet approach, but a veritable menagerie of rhythmic forms and sensibilities, and can seemingly bend time and bend it back within a few bars before you even realize what he's done.
This is a fabulous album that understatedly offers some real compositional, emotional, and technical treats.
-Alexander C. Kafka
