Carmen Lundy at Ronnie Scott’s, London

John Fordham, THE GUARDIAN

4 STARS

January 18, 2012

Carmen Lundy looked happy to be among friends at Ronnie Scott’s, an place that has felt like home to her kind of coolly expert, classic-to-contemporary jazz singing for years. The international career of the deep-toned, technically athletic and musically graceful American vocalist took off in London in the 1980s, and now Lundy returns the compliment by making the city the launchpad for her new album, Changes.

Lundy was accompanied by long-time partners Anthony Wonsey on keys and Darryl Hall on bass, with young drummer Jamison Ross giving the group a newly elemental, gospelly power. She began quietly, whispering her way through her Maya Angelou-inspired ballad I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, while Wonsey draped fragile, diaphanous piano figures around the yearning lyric. A full-on boppish swinger then deployed the sax-inspired technique that lets Lundy slide brusquely from a purring mid-range to an almost threatening baritone, the bold, lyric-mangling lines peppered with exclamatory sounds, and Wonsey delivered a classic 50s-bop piano break that started in silvery runs and wound up on chord-punching riffs. Later, a new ballad, So Beautiful, cherished a lover’s special qualities with a quiet urgency intensified by yodel-like phrasing, Cole Porter’s You’d Be So Easy to Love shifted from idiosyncratic confiding to a salsa groove, and her classic doomed-relationship song, You’re Not in Love, was as compelling as ever. The inclusion of occasionally funky love-and-peace anthems was laudable, releasing Lundy’s exuberant, Stevie Wonderish soul power – but they jarred a little with the robust realism of most of her work. Still, Lundy is an enduring and creative protector of a jazz vocal line embracing Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday and Betty Carter, and she sounds full of optimistic life.