Vocalist/pianist jazz duets play hard music the hard way. There isn't the sonorously reassuring tread of a double bass, or the insistent bustle of drums to give momentum - and on top of all that, the singer has the taxing task of figuring out something to do while the pianist is playing a solo, other than a little undulating, finger-snapping and shy smiling. It's a sport for the brave, the foolhardy, or the resourceful.
The pairing of the young Dutch vocalist Fleurine and American pianist Brad Mehldau (the most acclaimed jazz pianist of the last decade) seemed an unlikely one when the former's new Verve disc Close Enough For Love was announced. Mehldau was the quintessential contemporary jazz heavyweight, a meditative chamber musician of immense sophistication. Fleurine was the photogenic, standards-singing, multilingual, smooth-jazz singer. But the disc has proved they don't have to exist in parallel universes, and so did this London gig.
Fleurine sang tunes by Thelonious Monk, Curtis Fuller, Thad Jones and other classic jazz composers on her last disc, so the new mixture of Jobim, Legrand and Johnny Mandel undoubtedly sounds like a dinner-jazz move. But if she rarely raises the volume, Fleurine's work remains full of subtle impact and deft timing. If she treated Hendrix's Up From the Skies a little cautiously (as she also does on the CD), Mehldau immediately lifted it with a solo of typically awesome ambiguities and surprise turns, the swing constantly stretched and diverted by a left hand that sometimes suggests the presence of another pianist entirely.
Supertramp's The Logical Song suits Fleurine's fine timing and deceptive simplicity well, and the Mehldau solo on this theme had a character quite different from his earlier exploits, a purposeful meditation of short, explosive phrases. A Jobim episode brought out the daintier and more lyrical side of Mehldau that appeals to Keith Jarrett fans, and his rising cadence to meet Fleurine's returning thematic line (he began it when he spotted her rising from the unobtrusive backstage crouch she often adopted when out of the spotlight) was an exquisite piece of anticipation and empathy. The singer effortlessly ran her jazz credentials past the audience on the bop evergreen Anthropology (she sometimes recalls the instrument-like agility and light, glancing sound of vintage Annie Ross), and Mehldau brought the house down with his break on it, intertwining lines of such clamorous clarity and drive as to suggest a studio sample of half a dozen scalding jazz solos rather than a single one orchestrated by an improvising giant on the fly.
