Amy Cervini’s new recording, No One Ever Tells You, is her fifth, and it finds her at the center of the dilemma that jazz singers tend to confront these days. When she is singing a Sammy Cahn standard like “Please Be Kind”, she sounds natural and swinging, backed by a classic piano trio. It’s a fine performance, with her pliant, pleasantly-toned voice coming in atop a 1950s-styled bass/drum stroll then phrasing the mid-tempo swinger in a give-and-take style with piano as if she was Anita O’Day.
And this is, of course, cool music in a great tradition. But Cervini is aware enough that O’Day and many other terrific singers already cut thousands of sides like this over the last 60 years. Which is why she’s wise enough to explore a world of music beyond jazz standards or to apply new approaches to old tunes. An entire album in the style of “Please Be Kind” has simply been done to death, to death, to death. So, then, the challenge is to make a more varied collection cohere, connecting to the tradition without being “traditional”.
Cervini’s approach meets with mixed results on No One Ever Tells You, though the effort is often thrilling. A strong, surprising, and fully integrated performance comes on a cover of Blossom Dearie’s “Bye Bye Country Boy”. The original, with its skipping waltz time, always felt like a lilting lark, like a Michael Franks tune before its time. Cervini and her band scuff the tune-up to great effect, opening with Jesse Lewis’s unaccompanied (and blues-distorted) electric guitar. Jared Schonig’s drums don’t skip—they have a sloppy gut-bucket pocket, around which we hear the whirring Hammond organ of Gary Versace. The tune makes more sense this way, and when Cervini’s worldly vocal calls the subject of the song a “shiny toy”, well, you know exactly what kind of toy she’s singing about.
This approach works well on “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”, a song that has always lent itself to a funkier, sexier blues approach. Cervini starts with the lesser-heard verse, and then the band cracks into slow-drag blues-funk over which the singer can slide and slip, particularly as they play stop times. The piano solo by Michael McCabe fits the style well, but Lewis’s guitar, here at least, reaches further toward Hendrix (or even metal) blues than works entirely. Still, the effort is pushing toward something fresh. Similarly, the band turns “No One Ever Tells You” (originally from Sinatra’s A Swingin’ Affair LP) into a guitar-driven workout, complete with some emphatically thumped 12/8 drumming.
A different approach works well on Cervini’s version of “God Will”, the exceptionally clever, cynical Lyle Lovett tune. The narrator asks, who still trusts you and loves you “when you been lyin’?” The answer: “God does, but I don’t / God will but I won’t / That’s the difference between God and me”. The country waltz feeling of the original is here, but these guys swing it a bit more, and the super-subtle organ solo from Versace is a hip whisper using just one or two stops. Another variation that works is the impressionistic modern jazz approach heard on “You Know Who”, with time suspended between washes of hip chords.
But when you’re working this hard to sound different in different ways, not everything is going to work. A reimagining of “Surrey with the Fringe on Top” is downright perverse. The vocal is intoned solemnly and almost without tempo (“Chicks… and ducks… and… geese better… scurry…”) over a wash of droning guitar. Given the lyrics and history of the song, this is a textbook example of trying too hard to be cool, even if Cervini’s voice shines in this context. The singer’s original tune, “I Don’t Know”, uses the same kind of gut-bucket groove of some of the other songs, but this 12-bar blues is fairly pedestrian except for another magical Versace solo. Even the superb organist seems to be reaching on the duet version of “One for My Baby”. Versace can’t avoid a slight tinge of ballpark organ, which is cool, swinging, novel, and not really right for the song. At all.
What you never forget with Cervini is that she remains a jazz singer. Some singers of her generation, having been raised on every kind of rock, pop, folk, soul, and hip-hop, begin from a jazz tradition and vanish into their thousand other influences. Other singers remain tied to swing, 4/4 time, and standards so that any sense of innovation is minor. Amy Cervini uses jazz phrasing and rhythmic feel whatever the context and her approach to tonal production tie her back to a tradition as well. But she’s finding blue sky still. Although she hasn’t cracked the code yet on having a clear, consistent approach, this strong band makes the argument that a country-tinged blues approach to jazz has promise. Maybe it’s no coincidence that Charles Lloyd recently recorded with Lucinda Williams or that new-form jazz singers Cassandra Wilson and Norah Jones successfully placed country blues at the center of their work.
A last note about No One Ever Tells You that seems important: Amy Cervini’s voice has a bright, singing quality, yet she seems best recorded on the truly intimate songs, songs where she is low, quiet and close to the microphone. What No One Ever Tells You needs most is a slightly more even, consistent sound, with the voice as utterly present as the guitar, with the band in a balance and with a focus and purpose that can’t be missed. If “Please Be Kind” and “One for My Baby” weren’t here but the band had found a way to put their groove on a Johnny Cash song or to inject some blues into a dose of Cole Porter, every tune would feel more purposeful.
But the good parts of No One Ever Tells You are good enough that you sense that a remarkable date is still to come from this interesting, resourceful jazz singer.