Lucy Yeghiazaryan - Blue Heaven (2019)

Debut of 28-year-old vocalist Lucy Yeghiazaryan captured beautifully with an unmediated acoustically pure sound.When listening to Yeghiazaryan, one is struck by the fact that despite her strong presence musically, each performance seems less about her, and more about the ongoing story of that song, to which she is but one contributor. This idea, that jazz does not have definitive or quintessential versions (a Platonic ideal?), pushes up against the encroaching creep of jazz's ''classicization,'' empowering a more authentic & folkloric approach to performing, listening and appreciating this music.

Perhaps such an approach is not surprising given Yeghiazaryan's upbringing in Armavir, Armenia, where, as she explained, there was nothing special about singing, portraying it instead as simply part of everyday life. This connection to folk is most apparent in Yeghiazaryan's unpretentious (and decidedly non-precious) delivery of a lyric, which references the communicative power of such early influences as Elis Regina, Miriam Makeba and Etta Jones, and continuously draws the listener back to the original compositional meaning. It was these vocal influences, plus a steady listening diet of hard bop and a voracious desire to learn tunes–Yeghiazaryan can often be found in clubs writing down song titles to expand her repertoire–have resulted in a fully formed jazz artist who gigs frequently on the New York scene, often as a leader, but also as a side musician where she contributes not as a ''front-person'' per se, but rather as would any other top-drawer jazz player on the gig. Thankfully, for those listeners fortunate enough to hear Yeghiazaryan on record with Blue Heaven, she has assembled some of this musically simpatico community here with tenor saxophonist Grant Stewart, the woefully under-recorded guitarist Greg Ruggiero, young bassist Daniel Duke and the great drummer Steve Williams–no stranger to working with singers as longtime accompanist to the late Shirley Horn–all of whom are captured beautifully with an unmediated acoustically pure sound at Brooklyn's Wilson Live studio.



Track List:
01. Sweet Pumpkin
02. Nobody Else But Me
03. That Ole Devil Called Love
04. It's Crazy
05. Tenderly
06. Thou Swell
07. Love Isn't Everything
08. I Wish I Knew
09. I Got a Feeling I'm Fallin'
10. Beautiful Moons Ago
11. My Blue Heaven

LUCY YEGHIAZARYAN voice
GREG RUGGIERO guitar
GRANT STEWART tenor saxophone
DANIEL DUKE bass
STEVE WILLIAMS drums

More Music in My Blog
Follow My RSS Channel