2013

After Blue

Tierney Sutton

After nine CDs over 20 years with her longstanding Tierney Sutton band, the five-time Grammy-nominated Jazz vocalist decided to leave her comfort zone and leap off the cliff by tackling an homage to the revered pop singer/songwriter Joni Mitchell. With After Blue, her most daring and revealing project to date, Sutton puts her own unique stamp on familiar Mitchell tunes going back to 1969’s “Both Sides Now” and 1970’s “Big Yellow Taxi” and including more recent numbers like 1979’s “The Dry Cleaner from Des Moines” and 1982’s jivey “Be Cool,” along with Joni’s take on the standard “Don’t Go to Strangers” from her 2000 orchestral album, Both Sides Now.

Sutton performs a beautiful vocal alchemy with Mitchell’s material. She steps far enough out of her jazz box of familiarity to transform her voice into a new force of nature. With perfect comfort, Sutton renews this material with her singing. These performances exist on an equal footing with the originals, not as imitations, but as complete re-assimilations. This is what interpretive art is meant to be. This swirling evolution is what makes Sutton one of the two or three most important vocalists in the post-Fitzgerald-Vaughan-Carter period.

Another area in which Sutton excels is in the collaborative arranging of these songs. She has always experimented with format and does not alter her modus operandi here. On “Blue,” (arranged by David Balakrishnan) “Little Green,” (arranged by Julie Bernstein) and “Both Sides Now,” (arranged by Mark Summer)  as well as”All I Want,” Sutton is backed by the Turtle Island String Quartet. Sutton’s soprano is well suited for this chamber treatment making these pieces exceptional.