Lyrics that shine a candid light on life may have had a renaissance in popular music through rap. But they are more of a rarity in today's jazz. There is, however, a formidable force at work in Britain, still firing the imaginations of jazz artists with new songs that go to the heart of the matter: Fran Landesman.
Landesman came to recite some of her elegant ironies and off-handedly hilarious surveys of the Achilles heels of humanity at Lauderdale House in Highgate, north London. The young singers Sarah Moule and Nicki Leighton-Thomas delivered many others. It was jazz-infused music rather than jazz-period, and the improvising was mainly down to pianist Simon Wallace and Mick Hutton, with his succinct bass playing. But Landesman (who found her feet on the Kerouac/Ginsberg American beat scene of the 1950s) has always gravitated toward jazz and jazz singers. Bluesy intonation, imprecisions of pitch and nightclub imagery of dim light and smoke suit her examinations of frailty, unexpected thrills and mornings-after very well.
Landesman has lived in Britain for over 30 years, and since the mid-90s her output has redoubled rather than settled back on the laurels of two wonderful and much-recorded originals, Spring Can Really Hang You Up and The Ballad of the Sad Young Men. Both classics appeared in Thursday's show, the first delivered with an apposite blend of talkative, confiding phrasing, tremulous long sounds and blues-infused inflections by Moule, the second semi-spoken by Landesman herself. Her recitations were priceless - particularly the rewrite of Nat King Cole's Unforgettable as Unforgiveable, which ended: "I'm unforgiveable too."
Leighton-Thomas, a more direct and cabaret-angled performer, gracefully catches Landesman's bruised vivacity and gleeful wit, and Moule the lyricist's darker reflectiveness, so the two shed light on a unique body of material from different angles. Wallace wound a piano solo of fluid urgency around Moule's freewheeling account of It's a Nice Thought (about teeterings on the edge of an unwise liaison), and the two singers sonorously combined for an uptempo finale. A real one-off.
