Heidi Martin - ATTUNEMENT (2026) [Hi-Res]

Tracklist

01. There Is A Certain Point
02. Render Me Empty
03. Take Your Time
04. I Am His Nature
05. Every Thought In My Heart
06. How Convinced I Was
07. Congresswoman Maxine Waters
08. Being Lifted

Heidi Martin — and if that name doesn’t ring a bell, don’t worry, it barely rang one here either — is a Washington, D.C., vocalist whose previous record, Gifts & Sacrifices, drifted past this desk a few years back, leaving the faintest of impressions. Singer-songwriter sensibility, jazz framing, decent enough. Intriguing, but no knockout. File and move on. Attunement is something else entirely. This is the album where Martin stops circling the runway and lands.

The backstory matters here because it’s the whole engine of the record. Over 2023 and 2024, Martin held the Berger-Carter Berger Fellowship at Rutgers University’s Dana Library Jazz Studies Department, working through Abbey Lincoln’s personal journals in chronological order. Rather than churn out another tribute album — the world has enough of those — she picked up the phone to two musicians who’d spent over a decade in Lincoln’s band: pianist Marc Cary and bassist Michael Bowie. The call was originally just for stories. It turned into something far bigger. Bowie eventually came on as musical director and co-producer, and what emerged across eight Martin originals isn’t homage so much as transmission — songs written, as she puts it, in alignment with Lincoln’s spirit and philosophy.

And the lineage shows. Cary and Bowie don’t accompany Martin so much as live inside the songs with her. Eric Kennedy‘s drums hold the floor with patience and serious weight. Elijah Easton on tenor and Ethan Bailey Gould on guitar do the colouring-in. The whole thing settles into a southern-soulful-blues pocket dropped into a jazz frame — earthy, unhurried, refusing to oversell itself.

Now, full disclosure: this reviewer has had a long-running grudge against contemporary jazz vocalists. The bar set by Dianne Reeves, Cassandra Wilson, Carmen Lundy and Rachelle Ferrell has been a high one, and recent years have been a parade of near-misses — singers reaching for the sweet spot and finding the air an inch above it. So when I say Martin nails it on “There Is A Certain Point”, read that against the backdrop of someone who’s been waiting a long time to be wrong. She absolutely nails it. And here’s the audacious part: it’s the opening track. Most albums make you wait for the peak. Martin walks out, plants the flag, and dares the rest of the record to keep up. The phrasing is poised, the emotional read unforced, the band breathing around her with that telepathic restraint you only get from players who’ve earned each other. Five-out-of-five. Early best-of-year contender from this corner.

The remaining seven tracks don’t quite scale that summit, but they’re a consistent four-out-of-five — and that’s no small thing. “How Convinced I Was” is worth the entry price for Elijah Easton’s tenor alone: lyrical, conversational, never showing off. Martin takes the piano chair herself on one track, which says something about her growing confidence as a composer-instrumentalist rather than purely a vocalist.

Attunement is the sound of a singer-songwriter finding the right room, the right band, and the right material at the same moment. If you missed Gifts & Sacrifices, don’t worry about it — start here. And if Martin’s name still doesn’t ring a bell, after this one, it will.