Ian Shaw & Cedar Walton - In a New York Minute (1999)

Welsh jazz vocalist Ian Shaw makes an impressive American label debut here, with a freethinking repertoire, no drummer, and just the expert mainstream piano of co-headliner Cedar Walton, Iain Ballamy on saxophones and David Williams on bass behind him. While Shaw doesn't have a particularly striking or memorable timbre, he more than makes up for that in flexibility, range, and a wide spectrum of vocal influences from the bebop era and R&B through the unclassifiable Al Jarreau. In a disarmingly natural way, he can punch in falsetto tones that would sound freakish in less tasteful hands. He has interpretive imagination, stretching "Wouldn't It Be Loverly" into an entirely fresh new shape, concocting an uptempo, winningly jagged take on Joni Mitchell's "Furry Sings the Blues," reviving Bill Withers' "Grandma's Hands" with convincing soul. The last five numbers on the disc amount to a Sinatra suite, treated variously with Brazilian, straight-ahead, R&B strains, the emotional angst released at the close with a lightweight treatment of the uplifting "That's Life." Throughout, no matter the idiom, Shaw and Walton make a thoroughly simpatico team.