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SULTRY JAZZ SINGER JANE MONHEIT RETURNS TO SIOUX FALLS DECEMBER 3RD!
POSTED: NOV 18, 2009
“Jane Monheit can’t miss. She has, in a word, everything.”
-Time Magazine
Returning to the Orpheum Theater stage on Thursday December 3rd 2009, after a near sell-out performance in 2003, Jane Monheit is now at the height of her career as a singer and song interpreter.
Her debut album, Never Never Land, introduced the world to two indisputable facts. First, as the cover portrait demonstrated, Monheit is a stunning, raven-haired beauty. Second, as the ten standards that filled the impressive disc made immediately obvious, Monheit, with her crystalline voice and buttery phrasing, was (and remains) impossible to pigeonhole, simultaneously suggesting the smarts of a seasoned jazz artist and the cunning storytelling skills of the finest cabaret performer.
Never Never Land remained on the Billboard Jazz chart for over a year and was voted Best Debut Recording by the members of the Jazz Journalists Association. Her second release, Come Dream With Me, came just a year later and landed atop the Billboard Jazz charts and also earned a Grammy nomination for Vince Mendoza for “Best Instrumental Arrangement Accompanying Vocals” (as did 2003’s In The Sun for Mendoza’s arrangement of “Since You’ve Asked”). Monheit’s 2007 critically-lauded CD Surrender debuted at number one on the Billboard Jazz chart as well.
It is a lifelong musical journey from the dreamy innocence of Never Never Land to the world-weary delusion of Something Cool. Yet, Jane Monheit, now firmly established as one of the post-millennial jazz world’s foremost vocalists, has managed to make the trip in just eight years. In 2000, Monheit chose the sweet, escapist Peter Pan lullaby as the title tune for her debut album. Now, with The Lovers, the Dreamers and Me, her sophomore release for Concord (following 2006’s sumptuous Surrender), she is plumbing the gin‐soaked escapism of the heartrending tune made famous by June Christy in 1953.
But “Something Cool” is just one of several tracks on The Lovers, the Dreamers and Me, Monheit’s widest‐ranging and most accomplished album to date, that suggest the honey‐voiced chanteuse is ushering in an artistic era of heightened sagacity and maturity. She also navigates the dark corners of Tommy Wolf and Fran Landesman’s poignant “The Ballad of the Sad Young Men,” delivers a superlative interpretation of Paul Simon’s bittersweet “I Do It for Your Love” and embraces such contemporary songwriters as Corrine Bailey Rae (“Like A Star”) and Fiona Apple (“Slow Like Honey”). “I was,” confesses Monheit, “obsessed with Fiona Apple’s first record when I was in college, and that’s the album that song is from. I thought it was interesting to do it and “Like A Star” because both are by female songwriters who are almost exactly my age, and they’re songs I really love. I’m always doing songs from the Great American Songbook by long‐dead composers, mostly male. Standards are still where my heart is, but it’s great to go beyond that.”
The album’s powerful, glorious maturity can, Monheit agrees, be linked to the fact that the past year has been a significant one for her, with the celebration of her 30th birthday and the birth of her and husband Rick Montalbano’s first child, a son named Jack.
“Because I’m a little older,” she explains, “I did something different with this record. In the past, I always chose tunes that were very truthful to me and would be believable coming from a woman of my age. But for this album, I decided to step out and play a few characters and sing some lyrics that aren’t necessarily from my own life experience, but that I’m now mature enough to understand.”
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