Modernizing the harmony vocal pop of '30s and '40s groups like the Andrews Sisters, London's Puppini Sisters took the name of Marcella Puppini, who founded the act after being inspired by the music in the film The Triplets of Belleville. Puppini, a native of Bologna, Italy, moved to London in 1990 to study fashion and quickly became immersed in the city's music scene. Though she had a career at Vivienne Westwood's design studio, she left to focus on music, and in 2003 earned a music degree at Trinity College of Music. Jazz was her passion, and Puppini spent time as the musical director and orchestra conductor for the Whoopee Club, as well as leading her own quartet.

The debut release of a Scandinavian singer has seldom been as surprising as that of the Swedish vocalist Ida Sand two years ago with her album Meet Me Around Midnight (ACT 9716-2). It simply didn’t sound at all like a typical Scandinavian record. What the critics and the public heard was, “the most soulful white female singer to come along in some time” – earthy, tart, deep black, and authentically bound to gospel and blues. Beside this, another basic difference to a lot of other singers is that Ida Sand plays piano, and her singing and piano playing go hand in hand.

Karen Souza is an Argentinian jazz and bossa nova singer, songwriter, and producer. Souza began her career by providing vocals for producers of electronic music. Under pseudonyms she sang versions of hits songs from the 70s, 80s, and 90s, such as "Creep" by Radiohead and "Do You Really Want to Hurt Me" by Culture Club. Her version of "Creep" was used in the film The Zero Theorem (2013). In 2010, she performed at Blue Note Tokyo and signed a contract with JVC Victor in Japan. She has toured in Venezuela, Brazil, Mexico, China, Korea, Spain, and Italy.

Acclaimed Danish vocalist and songwriter Lilly Hertzman returns this Spring with her sixth studio album, Heartshaped, a deeply personal offering with roots reaching back more than a decade. Recorded in New York, Heartshaped (April 17th, 2026) revisits a set of eight unrecorded originals, brought to life alongside acclaimed pianist Aaron Parks, his longtime bass collaborator Thomas Morgan, and award-winning Korean drummer Jongkuk Kim.

Leslie Vincent's new record "Little Black Book" explores the nuances, heartaches, and joys of dating and marriage in the modern age.

Old Fashioned Gal, the title of Kat Edmonson's fourth record, certainly describes the singer. Edmonson doesn't truck with modern styles, whether they're musical or technological, but that doesn't mean she's stuck in the past. She's working an older style – one that's rooted in the first half of the 20th century – but she's adding to tradition by writing a set of original songs that blend modern lyrical sensibilities with the style of the Great American Songbook. It's a sly, subtle accent on a record that could be mistaken for an old-fashioned LP – the music and the arrangements are intimate, yet lush; the tempo is never hurried, which gives Edmonson plenty of time to luxuriate in her melodies – and that helps give this cabaret music an air of welcome freshness.

Vocalist, composer and pianist Nina Simone returned from a lengthy self-imposed exile in 1993 with an autobiography and outstanding CD highlighting her still impressive singing and interpretative skills in an intriguing context, surrounded by strings and guitars. While the backdrops were lush and occasionally corny, Simone's deep, penetrating voice, careful pacing and dramatic delivery kept the songs from becoming sappy. While she's always been a great protest and political singer, Simone is also a superb romantic/love song stylist. Simone remains among America's premier performers, and this CD was a welcome addition to her sparkling legacy.

Much can be said about the late Amy Winehouse, one of the U.K.'s flagship vocalists during the 2000s. The British press and tabloids seemed to focus on her rowdy behavior, heavy consumption of alcohol, and tragic end, but fans and critics alike embraced her rugged charm, brash sense of humor, and distinctively soulful and jazzy vocals. Her platinum-selling breakthrough album, Frank (2003), elicited comparisons ranging from Billie Holiday and Sarah Vaughan to Macy Gray and Lauryn Hill. Interestingly enough, despite her strong accent and vernacular, one can often hear aspects of each of those singers' vocal repertoires in Winehouse's own voice. Nonetheless, her allure had always been her songwriting – almost always deeply personal but best known for its profanity and brutal candor.

Two of singer Chris Connor's finest Atlantic albums are reissued in full on this single CD. The laid-back yet coolly emotional jazz singer is heard backed by top-notch rhythm sections (with either Ralph Sharon or Stan Free being the pianist/arranger) and occasional horns (trumpeter Joe Wilder, flutist Sam Most, tenors Al Cohn and Lucky Thompson, flutist Bobby Jaspar and Al Epstein on English horn and bass clarinet) adding some short solos. Connor (then around 30) was in her prime, and her renditions of such songs as "Poor Little Rich Girl," "Lonely Town," "I'm Shooting High," "Moonlight in Vermont," and even "Johnny One Note" are memorable and sometimes haunting.

The trio featured in this project pays tribute to some of the great composers/interpreters of South American culture and what it has done for the universe by weaving the thin thread that binds the past to the present. In other words, Paolo Fresu wrote some texts in Sardinian on the music of Linx. Linx adapted some English texts for Pablo Milanés and Famke Sinninghe Damsté as well as writing some texts in Dutch for Milton Nascimento. Beytelmann composed from the world of Piazzolla and embellished Linx's and Fresu's poetry with his touch. Trama Latina is in short, a tribute to the energy that swings between continents and cultures.

The most expressive of jazz vocalists, Blossom Dearie's first three records for Verve - all masterpieces - displayed an artist with an uncommon ability to transfer a well-worn standard into a new song, usually informed by her light touch with piano and voice as well as her delightful coquette persona. My Gentleman Friend, her final full-length for the label, suffers only in comparison to her previous work; with fewer all-time standards available from her performing repertoire, Dearie was forced to resort to a few French titles and many middle-rank or then-current standards. It doesn't come as a surprise, then, that the song with the most compositional weight - George and Ira Gershwin's "Someone to Watch Over Me" - is the highlight. Dearie gracefully tiptoes through the classic, her reading rosy and meditative…

Diana Krall paid tribute to her father on Glad Rag Doll, the 2012 album sourced from his collection of 78-rpm records, and, in a sense, its 2015 successor Wallflower is a companion record of sorts, finding the singer revisiting songs from her childhood. Like many kids of the 20th century, she grew up listening to the radio, which meant she was weaned on the soft rock superhits of the '70s – songs that earned sniffy condescension at the time but nevertheless have turned into modern standards due to their continual presence in pop culture (and arguably were treated that way at the time, seeing cover after cover by middlebrow pop singers).

But Beautiful is an album of pop standards by Boz Scaggs, released in 2003. An assured, logical next step in an enduring musical career, But Beautiful signals the arrival of an important new voice in the domain of the great American songbook. It features Scaggs performing standards such as Sophisticated Lady, and Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered with the classic jazz quartet that includes pianist and arranger Paul Nagel and bright new star from the San Francisco jazz scene, saxophonist Eric Crystal. But Beautiful reached number one on the Billboard Top Jazz Albums chart in 2004.