Suzanne Pittson, Bevan Manson - Conversations (2026) [Hi-Res]

Tracklist

01. Like a Byrd (Byrd Like)
02. After You
03. Confirmation
04. I'm a Fool to Want You
05. Out of the Hub (One of Another Kind)

Suzanne Pittson – voice; Bevan Manson – piano; track 5 “Out Of The Hub” Suzanne Pittson – voice, synthesizer (soloist); Bevan Manson – piano (soloist); Trey Henry – bass; Matt Gordy – drums; Wade Culbreath – timpani; Brass & Woodwinds: Wayne Bergeron, Larry Hall, Gary Grant – trumpet; Bob McChesney – trombone; Brian O’Connor – French horn; Matt Zebley – alto saxophone (soloist); Bob Sheppard – tenor saxophone; Brian Scanlon – clarinet; Tom Boyd – oboe; Ben Wendel – bassoon;

Twenty years ago, Suzanne Pittson recorded a handful of songs with pianist Bevan Manson and then, for reasons that don’t really matter now, let them sit. When she finally pulled the old session back out this year, she wasn’t prepared for how good it still sounded. That rediscovery is Conversations, and it sounds less like a lost recording and more like a conversation two old friends simply picked back up mid-sentence.

Pittson wanted to play classical piano before a hand injury pushed her toward jazz — which maybe explains why her voice moves like an instrument; she phrases like a horn player and can improvise her way into corners on any melody you throw her way. Manson, a composer as comfortable writing for orchestras as he is comping behind a singer, matches her at every turn with a touch that’s classically trained yet jazzically loose.

“Like a Byrd” kicks the record off at full speed — words tumbling out fast, clean, her diction never blurring no matter how hard she swings through the changes. Manson matches her note for note, running every inch of the keyboard, banging out high notes one moment and hitting on the low end the next. She goes wordless, phrases smearing into the next, her vocal range, intimidating. It’s a genuinely exciting way to open a record. “Confirmation” runs on the same fuel — pure bebop, Pittson scatting through Charlie Parker’s brutal changes while Manson walks a bass line underneath her left-handed, the two of them trading ideas like sparring partners who really like each other.

When the music turns inward, you realize what a versatile, well-rounded singer Pittson is — the same voice that just ripped through bebop scatting turns into a ballad singer! Pittson answers “After You’s” pretty opening piano by pulling back on the time, playing with the vocals, concentrating on individual words, turning the whole thing into a beautifully suspended, slow-burning groove. She sings like she’s singing to you, no one else. “I’m a Fool to Want You” goes even further into that quiet, her voice delicate, nearly vibrato-less, while Manson’s sudden bursts on the piano can’t keep him away from the tenderness between them.

“Out of the Hub” closes the record with the second of two Freddie Hubbard tunes — Hubbard’s trumpet was always about a blazing technique and a bright tone, and Pittson brings that same fearlessness to how she sings, pushing words hard and bending them the way he’d bend a phrase on horn. The track has its own strange history: Manson first arranged it back in 2009, and the recording sat unfinished until 2023, when Pittson and Manson returned to add the orchestra and her vocal improvisations. The arrangement trades the duo’s intimacy for a full orchestra, strings and horns blooming outward from one of Manson’s repeated piano figures — there’s a sax solo that soars against a wall of strings, horns blaring out short phrases underneath. Pittson moves between sung lyric and wordless improvisation until a trumpet and a lone violin trade voices with her before everything goes quiet.

Pittson and Manson had chord charts, instinct, and nothing else the day they recorded this. Twenty years on, that’s still all Conversations needs. Some moments just wait for the right time.