Sophie Duner & Jeremy Harman - The City Of Dizzy (2016)

It is my distinct pleasure to know Sophie Dunér not only from her music but from some of her e-mails to me. I say that because I am often in awe of the way she can pull together disparate musical elements and make them congeal into shapes and sounds that almost defy description. It is very rare for a jazz singer to do this unless, like Sheila Jordan, she is so thoroughly versed in music that she can extract the essence of anything she chooses and then pour into it the crucible of her inner self. Jazz is so personal an expression to Dunér that she can no more live without it than she can live without air to breathe or food to eat.

This album is a perfect case in point. Framed between two modern jazz classics, Charles Mingus’ Weird Nightmare (originally composed and recorded in the 1940s as Pipe Dream) and Miles Davis’ Blue in Green are seven originals in which she synthesizes some of her favorite musical influences, among them (as she told me) Stravinsky and Thelonious Monk (listen to Reharmonized Boyfriend on this album: it sounds like a rewritten version of Well, You Needn’t). Her music has a certain piquant angularity, yet it also swings—at times, quite hard, despite that fact that in this album she, like Sheila Jordan, has reduced her accompaniment to a single string instrument. Yet even here the musical differences are almost as great as the similarities. Jordan has, over the decades, preferred to work with Harvie Swartz, a consummate bassist yet one rooted in the traditional use of the bass as an accompanying instrument, while Dunér chooses to use cellist Jeremy Harman, a musician whose use of his instrument almost defies description. Despite the fact that most of his playing is bowed, not plucked, Harman generates enough rhythmic propulsion to drive a big band, let alone a single vocalist. He also plays in the violin range on two selections!

But Sophie Dunér is no more a typical jazz singer than Mingus was a typical jazz bassist or Freddie Hubbard a typical jazz trumpeter. Her work not only has guts but is so full of surprises—the way she manipulates rhythm, and along with that the way she manipulates harmonies—that in the end one can only declare her style unique. There are elements of Annie Ross, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Cleo Laine, Betty Carter and Anita O’Day in her singing, but the final synthesis sounds only like her. And I should be remiss if I didn’t point out the purity of her tone and the utter accuracy of her pitch, no matter how quickly she is singing her wide-ranging scat figures.

The main point I am trying to make, and which I hope the reader appreciates, is that Sophie Dunér takes you on a ride. She has places to go where few have gone before; in a sense, she reminds me of a female Mark Murphy. All you know is that when you arrive where she is going, it isn’t where you expected to be, but it is somewhere you feel was worth exploring.

The one selection on this new collection most reminiscent of her work in the superb CD The City of My Soul is Rattlesnake with its quirky rhythm and simple but elusive melodic construction. In this piece, she actually does less in terms of improvisation than in the other tracks, but she doesn’t have to. It is more of a composition, and needs to be heard in terms of its structure. By contrast, The Express Train has an almost R&B beat to it. Were her voice an octave lower in pitch and timbre, this is the one where she would sound the most like Sister Rosetta shouting the blues, except that her use of upper harmonics in both the tune’s constriction and her improvisations are much wilder and more modern.

Perhaps the most unusual feature of Dunér’s singing is that, despite her gutsy delivery and startling command of both range and her sense of improvisation, it manages to sound strangely seductive. But this is not the kind of seduction one is used to from your typically “submissive” female vocalists; it is not a come-hither cutesy wink, but the sound of a woman in perfect control of her life and her mind who wants you to share something more intimate with her: her soul. Sophie Dunér wants to bond with her listeners on a very deep level.

And she succeeds. ~Lynn René Bayley (Freelance jazz and classical music critic)