[Dixielandjazz] Madeleine Peyroux - The Jazz Singer.

[Steve Barbone]

Has anybody heard this lady sing?  Echoes of Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday
and Edith Piaf? Comments?

Cheers,
Steve Barbone


A Singer Oblivious to Fashion, but Not to Life

NY TIMES - By STEPHEN HOLDEN - September 12, 2006

The jazz singer Madeleine Peyroux has a Mona Lisa voice and a personality to
match. As she delicately swings the standard ³Smile² on her new album, ³Half
the Perfect World² (Rounder), you can read whatever emotions you want in her
sly, enigmatic interpretation. She is either suppressing a secret smile or
holding back tears. Or both. Riding on a 30¹s folk-jazz lilt, her timeless
interpretation floats into the ether like a wisp of milkweed.

³Somebody called up the other day and said, ŒEvery time I hear that song it
just makes me cry ‹ it¹s the saddest song on the record,¹ ² Ms. Peyroux
recalls over lunch in a small French restaurant near her apartment in
Brooklyn. ³It made me think of the Bill Moyers ŒFaith and Reason¹ program in
which he asked Richard Rodriguez why he wrote such sad books. And he replied
that he thought Americans are actually very sad under the surface. I know my
intentions were poetic, and there¹s an ambiguity to what it means, but I
didn¹t mean it to be the saddest song on the record.² She laughs.

Wearing a black shirt, her hair parted in the middle, with little or no
makeup, Ms. Peyroux is as mysterious a figure as her music. As oblivious to
fashion in her austere appearance as in her singing with its powerful echoes
of Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday, she suggests a latter-day hippie without
the stereotypical 60¹s trappings of hippiedom.

There is no jivey argot in her conversation and not a trace of
anti-Establishment smugness in her attitude. She regards the world with a
steady, wide-eyed gaze through which tinges of amusement flicker.

Personal honesty is extremely important to her, she says, then qualifies
that by admitting that she¹s shyer than she would like to be. That
translates into a person who is forthright but not readily forthcoming.

Born in Athens, Ga., to a bohemian academic family, she has few memories of
the South but recalls that her parents, whom she describes as ³hippies,²
didn¹t fit in their social environment. When she was 6, her father, a
teacher at the University of Georgia, born in New Orleans, moved the family
to Brooklyn because he wanted to pursue acting. When her parents divorced,
she moved, at 13, to Paris with her mother.

Having been exposed as a child to Johnny Cash, Robert Johnson and Louis
Armstrong from her father¹s record collection, she discovered a new musical
horizon abroad. 

³Music for me has always been a link to understanding and relating to
people, and in Paris I felt like a real outcast,² she recalls. ³My epiphany
came from seeing street musicians there. This was real life as opposed to
listening to great records.²

Ms. Peyroux, now 32, said she was 15 when she joined a band of street
musicians who traveled around playing little-known country-blues songs from
the 1930¹s. When the band got a job in a jazz club, she forsook school to
remain with it for the next three years. It was during this period, she
said, that she soaked up the music of Smith, Holiday and (from her mother¹s
records) Édith Piaf.

³These women actually spoke their own stories,² she said. ³Whether they
wrote the song or not, they transformed the material and gave it a dramatic
perspective. It was more than acting. They were hypnotic.²

Ms. Peyroux disagrees with a reporter¹s suggestion that Holiday wallowed in
a prefeminist stew of romantic masochism.

³I read a book by Angela Davis in which she connects blues women and black
feminism,² she said. ³She describes the power of these women singing about
domestic violence or abuse as feminist, because they touched on a subject
that was taboo. Billie Holiday successfully battled an amazing amount of
things. She was a real champion for black musicians at a time when jazz
clubs were segregated. By stating so honestly what she was suffering through
and putting it on the table as an artist, she gave us something to do with
it.²

A French record producer, Yves Beauvais, heard her in a New York club and
then followed her to Paris; he signed her to Atlantic Records and
co-produced her blues-oriented first album, ³Dreamland,² in 1996. After a
vocal crisis that required surgery, she took a sabbatical from performing.
Dropped by Atlantic and briefly signed to Columbia, then dropped before
making a record, she was eventually approached by Rounder, the Boston
independent label for which she made her second album, ³Careless Love,²
released in 2004. 

Working with a new producer, Larry Klein (Joni Mitchell¹s former husband)
and a new group of musicians, she refined a style that blends elements of
jazz, folk and blues into a delicate quasi-30¹s and -40¹s period sound that
is sophisticated but feels homemade. Though completely outside the pop
mainstream the record has sold more than 400,000 copies.

Led off by ³Dance Me to the End of Love² by Leonard Cohen, ³Careless Love²
broadened Ms. Peyroux¹s focus to include contemporary songs. And on ³Half
the Perfect World,² made with the same producer and musicians, the title
song was also written by Mr. Cohen (with Anjani Thomas.)

Although Ms. Peyroux has forsaken early blues on her third album, its more
modern songs have the same blend of ethereality and early-20th-century roots
consciousness as those on ³Careless Love.² Familiar titles include Tom
Waits¹s ³(Looking for) The Heart of Saturday Night,² Joni Mitchell¹s ³River²
(a duet with K. D. Lang), Fred Neil¹s ³Everybody¹s Talkin¹,² and most
unlikely of all, the Sinatra hit, ³Summer Wind,² which is transformed from a
lounge standard into an intimate diaristic meditation. She wrote three songs
with her producer and Jesse Harris (a Norah Jones collaborator) and a fourth
with Mr. Klein and Walter Becker, of Steely Dan.

If the casual listener might still mistake Ms. Peyroux for Holiday on
occasion, the closer attention one pays, the more apparent are their
differences. Ms. Peyroux¹s stealthy phrasing, which lingers behind the beat,
may be pure Holiday, but the substance of her voice is more fragile and not
as earthy. She is softly, wistfully dreaming out loud.

The common denominator in everything she sings is a current of sadness. Hers
is a lonely voice. From ³River,² to ³Everybody¹s Talkin¹,² to ³Half the
Perfect World,² which glides on a bossa nova pulse, many of the songs evoke
a desire to escape.

Asked about the source of her sadness, she says it is something she felt
growing up in a family troubled by alcoholism and domestic strife in which
these troubles were rarely brought out in the open. On top of that, the nine
years she spent abroad contributed to her sense of feeling different and
apart. 

³I know that at a certain point I came back to the United States and
realized I could see things from the outside in,² she says, but adds that
music has been a path out of that isolation.

³It¹s the center of making a philosophy of life,² she says, ³of joining
forces in a small community to do something interesting.²