- As an old curmudgeon it is my job in life to disapprove of a lot of things. To wit, today's crop of jazzy singer-songwriters are just rubbish compared to the chanteuses of yester-year. I'll take Sarah Vaughn, Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holliday over your Diana Krall, Cassandra Wilson and Norah Jones any day of the week. I was pretty set in my ways, until I heard the not-particularly-well-known-outside-of-Canada Jill Barber at the Woodford Folk Festival back a few years ago. She was touring off the back of her international debut, Chances and I found a couple of things about her quite arresting. The first was her low-slung voice which has something of the quality of Lamb's Lou Rhodes with just a touch of Dolly Parton's brassy power and quivering vibrato; nice. The other thing she does which really caught my attention is use that voice in the service of the music of yesteryear. Not favouring any particular bit of it, she's just as much at home singing Bacharach-esque pop tunes, 30s jazz crooners (the 40s and 50s too for that matter) or some heart-aching soul number. Heck, just about the best track off her debut, Oh My My, was a foot-stomping spiritual - she goes all over. And where she goes so does her band and you best belive me when I say they're rather frickin' tight. There are some strings in there who're are given some rather sensationally good arrangements by fiddle-player Drew Jurecka, and if it means I focus an unfair amount on them rather the clarinetist, trumpet, vibraphone player, drummer pianist, bassist, well you listen to the string section and you tell me how you feel.
You can get a little too excited at Woodford (they pump some kind of gas into the air) and I've got curmudgeonly appearances to keep up, but I picked up a copy of that album Chances a bit later on and I was sold. Four long years later and we've got our hot little hands on Barber's follow-up, haven't we? Mischievous Moon it's called and it hits you with the title track straight up, a slow jazz number just loaded up with the stringed goodness I've been talking about. It follows up with Took Me By Surprise, Bacharachesque pop and a bossa-nova beat, oh and there's a bit of a slow and darkly aching Soul duet on Tell Me. Well, I could take you through the whole thing - but I'll leave a little a little of the mystery intact for you. I will give away the melancholy French language rocker Dis-Moi, up the end - you should stick around for that. If I'm honest, part of the reason I'm not rabbiting about the whole record is it didn't grab me quite as strongly as Chances. Some of the lyrics are a bit unspired and that perfect evocation of the past, one of the things which makes Jill Barber so good, is occasionally a problem too: like her tribute is so spot-on, it becomes a text-book excercise or even kitschy. Still, if it isn't as exciting as I wanted it to be, Mischievous Moon still has some bloody solid songwriting on it and I really would still rather listen to her than Diana Krall, Cassandra Wilson or Norah Jones. You might think that's a lot to say listen to that title track Mischevous Moon and see if you don't feel a little bit of what I'm talking about.

- Chris Cobcroft.