Rita Edmond - Sketches Of A Dream (2008)

While the jazz world continues to celebrate the celebrity of great contemporary vocalists like Diana Krall and Dianne Reeves, some of the most powerfully emotional, soulful singing and jazzy phrasing and arrangements in the late 2000s are coming from indie artists like Rita Edmond. This wonderfully conceived and produced set of 16 standards -- which you might think you've heard enough of until you hear them refashioned so imaginatively and beautifully again like this -- isn't just a random collection of Great American Songbook tunes. For the California-based vocalist, the CD title has a meaning and a story. Balancing snazzy uptempo charts on "All the Way," "On the Street Where You Live," and "My Romance" with gentler contemplations of Jobim's "Dindi" and the divinely torchy and melancholic Jay Livingston-Ray Evans tune "Never Let Me Go," Edmond is sketching out a lifetime dream of what she wants to accomplish vocally. Her lifelong love of and leaning toward jazz is obvious; throughout the multifaceted set, she conveys her belief that it is the most liberating, free-flowing music that exists. Choosing her songs carefully, tapping into the sorrow and joys of life, she fashions with these sketches a career-defining work that is truly the culmination of a life deeply felt and well lived. The good news is, now that she's achieving her dream, her recording career is just getting started.