Katie King - Harry's Fight (2008)

She's not quite a torch singer, but you're likely to get that sense from the album cover and the American songbook selections. For her fourth album (and first in ten years), Katie King plunges through some admittedly torchy pieces, but also includes a few rather catchy original numbers and adaptations of a few pop (primarily Beatles) pieces.
The album opens with an original that comes out a bit stuttered, almost in the realm of a slow rap with a jazz backdrop. After the first Beatles piece and the classic "All or Nothing at All," she rearranges (with pianist Bill Anschell's help) Paul Simon's "50 Ways to Leave Your Lover," leaving an almost unrecognizable but excellent piece of post-bop in her wake.
On an old Nina Simone number, King gets a bit of oomph that's missing in her straight ballads as well as her stiffer spoken deliveries, and lets sax player Craig Flory jump out for a few bars here and there. She vamps it up strongly for "Come Together," for a very nice effect over Anschell's sparse comping. Making her way through traditional pieces, another original, and a couple of classics, King finishes off with a solo version of "Here Comes the Sun," again reworked heavily to good effect. While the band here (bassist Jeff Johnson and new drummer D'Vonne Lewis in addition to Flory and Anschell) has an outstanding approach to every song, and is able to move from sensitive background accompaniment into full-fledged sound explorations la Miles Davis' band, King stays stiff throughout nearly all of her deliveries.
Her voice has a crisp sound that works well with the phrasing, but the phrasing itself rarely fits in well with the intended mix of crooning and vamping that she really seems to be shooting for. The Beatles tracks may be worth the price of admission themselves, but the rest of the album comes off with more mixed results.(Adam Greenberg)