Cyrille Aimee & The Surreal Band - Live at Birdland (2013)

Michael Jackson brushes shoulders with Sarah Vaughan in the person of Cyrille Aimée, a saucy, curly-haired jazz singer with one foot in tradition and the other in electronics. When Ms. Aimée’s show at Birdland opened on Tuesday evening, those two feet playfully kicked heels. Her connection with Vaughan is more in name than in sound. She recently won the first International Sarah Vaughan Jazz Vocal Competition, held in Vaughan’s native city, Newark.
With her tart, girlish chirp, Ms. Aimée is actually Vaughan’s aural and stylistic opposite. Her voice hasn’t the tiniest drop of the voluptuous lushness that imbued Vaughan’s friskiest performances with a semioperatic grandeur. Ms. Aimée, who was born in Fontainebleau, France, to a French father and a Dominican mother, is all about beats. She is a one-woman rhythm machine.
Which brings us to Jackson, whom she honors with a sensational rendition of “Wanna Be Startin’ Something,” using a loop pedal, a device that stores and layers sounds on top of one another with the click of a button. An electronic chorus can be produced in seconds. Bobby McFerrin uses similar techniques in a more ethereal way. On Tuesday Ms. Aimée’s traditional and her futuristic sides fused when her excellent ensemble, the Surreal Band, embellished the electronics with jazz-funk textures.
Ms. Aimée sustained an easy rapport with her musicians: Wayne Tucker on trumpet, Matt Simons on sax, Assaf Gleizner on piano, Jeremy Bruyere on bass and Rajiv Jayaweera on drums. The set included mid- and up-tempo versions of ballads — “The Lamp Is Low,” “A Dream Is a Wish Your Heart Makes,” “You and the Night and the Music,” “You Stepped Out of a Dream” — that invite a dreamy, romantic approach. But Ms. Aimée stubbornly resisted sweetness and treated the songs as platforms for breezy, Latin-inflected arrangements.
Ms. Aimée’s interest in song lyrics is minimal. In her transformation of John Fogerty’s bitter, politically charged broadside, “Fortunate Son,” into an electronic showpiece, its anger fell by the wayside. The concert’s wide-ranging program also brought together Thelonious Monk, Oscar Brown Jr. and Serge Gainsbourg in the same multicultural tent, where rhythm overruled emotion.