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Straight No Chaser - A Jazz Show


Welcome to Straight No Chaser, the Award-winning Podcast hosted by Jeffrey Siegel

Jan 21, 2016

Since winning the “Triple Crown” of Jazz Vocal Competitions – Montreux Jazz Festival, Thelonious Monk International Jazz Vocal Competition and Sarah Vaughan International Jazz Vocal Competition – Cyrille Aimee has been working hard at carving out a special place for her talents in the music world. While she plays and has recorded with her traditional jazz backing group, the Surreal Band, her recordings for Detroit’s Mack Avenue label have eschewed the piano/horn sound of most singers.

Instead, she has drawn on her life experiences, growing up the daughter of a Dominican mother and French father in the town of Samois-sux-Seine in France, the home of the annual Django Reinhardt Festival. The result is a multi-guitar approach to jazz sound with a wink at gypsy jazz, an approach that suits her sometimes chirpy vocal style to a T.

Let’s Get Lost is her second album for Mack Avenue (after 2014’s It’s a Good Day), and again it mixes originals with her versions of lesser known standards and international sounds. Her band – Adrien Maignard and Michael Valeanu on guitars, Sam Anning on bass and Rajiv Jayaweera on drums – is a tight, well-executed ensemble, and they lift the songs in every way.

Her version of the title song, best known as a slightly-up-tempo ballad from Chet Baker, is a good insight into the Aimee approach. Rather than give us yet another cover version of a great song, we get a version that brings to mind flappers and bootleg gin, the tune taken a Charleston-like speed.

Podcast 518 is my conversation with Cyrille, where we discuss her musical origins, how she chooses material, and the nature of her sound. Musical selections include a top-notch cover of Stephen Sondheim’s “Live Alone and Like It”, the title track, "Each Day" and her creative collaboration with Valeanu on “Nine More Minutes”.