Normal As Blueberry Pie

Fantastic female singer orchestrates and sings a tribute to Doris Day (keep in mind that these are songs that Day sang, not wrote, so theres songs by Antonio Carlos Jobim to Burt Bacharach as well as Gershwin in here). It’d be easy to pass this off as kitsch irony or (worse) hipster worship until you hear it. Her voice is perfect, like she went to a witch doctor and is now channeling Doris Day. The instrumentation is top-flight jazz (I don’t recognize the player/production credits but I suspect this is littered with heavy hitters). Its all just about as perfect as can be. I could mark every track as a highlight. Pick any really.

1) simple, with piano and vibes, a little percussion, her voice is hauntingly Doris
2) swingy barroom jazzy with muffled trumpet, sassy a la louis Armstrong
3) marching triplet tune slides into cool bachelor pad jazz, wow, on the level of Coltrane
4) holy fuck! brasillian love music by Antonio Carlos Jobim, a la girl from ipanema, but completely minimal just using a uke and a silken trombone and clarinet
5) swingy Django’esque jazz, sadness with rip roaring guitar playing in bridge
6) flapper jazz sorta, upbeat
7) mega-hit: sentimental journey, slow and sparse and sexy
8) dreamy, “if I ever had a dream”, lovely lounge with heartwrenching violin
9) cliché “indian” (as in native American) drum beat but the vocals, so crystalline and pure are almost too much, this CD should come with an MSDS
10) bouncy swing jazz with the band calling out to her, flirtatiously, fun fun fun (the media no doubt hid Doris’ sexy side)
11) uke and trombone simplicity, pretty
12) swingy, bordering on skat, perfection
13) Steel drums and brass figure highly on this take of “I remember you”, almost creepy