Cyrille Aimee & Friends - Live at Smalls (2011) Lossless

Cyrille Aimée is a young French jazz singer living in New York. She has become a regular at Smalls jazz club (which routinely documents its gigs on CD and online, so her reputation might deservedly spread), often alongside pianist Spike Wilner and saxophonist Joel Frahm, who are joined here by trumpeter Roy Hargrove. There are plenty of standards (Yesterdays, Love for Sale, Lover Man), but Aimée is a subtle and articulate vocalist with a lot of harmonic awareness, and her partnership with Wilner is a very sympathetic one. She's light-stepping, casually fluent and persuasive on a softly swinging September in the Rain, with Frahm's luxurious tenor lines winding around her. She's coolly understated in a soft glide with Wilner and Hargrove on Que Reste-T'il, while a Latin Love for Sale works better than the notion implies, and Aimée deftly negotiates the rhythmic pitfalls in delivering Jon Hendricks's lyrics to Thelonious Monk's bumpy and swinging I Mean You. A finale on Ben E. King's Stand By Me reveals broader world-music qualities in Aimée than her mostly swing-and-standards choices imply.