Madeleine Peyroux emerged in 1996 with Dreamland, an album that drew attention because the 22-year-old French-American vocalist, fronting a band of jazz stalwarts, sounded eerily similar to Billie Holiday—indeed, more so than all the other delicate-voiced singers who have drawn that comparison over the decades.After that, Peyroux disappeared for a few years, performing occasionally at jazz and folk festivals. She returned in 2004 with Careless Love, and like the crisply colored CD cover, she’d found her focus. Her creative growth appeared even more vivid on last year’s outstanding Half the Perfect World, in which Peyroux revealed a relaxed confidence not heard earlier. Where she once recited songs with reserved good taste, she now inhabits them with nuance, adding new meaning even to such American standards as “Summer Wind,” “Everybody’s Talkin’ ” and Charlie Chaplin’s sublime “Smile.”
Still, Peyroux relies less on the classic American songbook, and the peculiar way she mixes originals with cherry-picked songs from across the decades is one of her strengths. Leonard Cohen is the only writer to get two covers here, which says a lot about Peyroux’s mature view of romance. That the two songs are the title cut and “Blue Alert”—two recent Cohen co-writes with Anjani Thomas—says even more about Peyroux’s ability to rely on her own instincts. She’s assured enough now to find her own deep-catalog cuts rather than fall back on the same rehashed Cohen classics.
Working with California producer Larry Klein, who emphasizes a big, soft bass bottom accented with brushed drums, Peyroux plays nicely off her soloists, especially keyboardist Larry Goldings, guitarist Dean Parks and alto saxophonist Gary Foster. She also writes more, and better, than in the past. Her opening “I’m All Right,” written with Klein and Steely Dan’s Walter Becker, is as effective as anything on the album.
A native of Georgia, Peyroux spent her teen and early adult years in France, something she likes to draw on by placing a French cabaret song on each album. On Half the Perfect World, her choice is Serge Gainsbourg’s “La Javanaise.” With it’s old-world feel—Peyroux sings it like she’s channeling Marlene Dietrich in a Josef von Sternberg film—“La Javanaise” doesn’t fit the contemporary feel of the rest of the album, but it is a charming side trip.
But the best tracks would seem the least likely to work on paper, partly because they’re so strongly identified with the artists who wrote them. Tom Waits’ “(Looking For) The Heart of Saturday Night,” a rare, unabashedly sweet and sentimental song from early in its composer’s career, gives Peyroux a chance to cast off her worldliness and celebrate an evening that appears unusually rosy and full of possibilities.
Even better, Peyroux joins with k.d. lang for a slower, strunningly powerful take on Joni Mitchell’s “River.” Their duet culls the agony of a woman realizing she’s pushed away the best man she’s ever loved while noticing the Christmas glitter around her and wishing she could escape it all. The pairing of lang’s deep-amber alto and Peyroux’s slighter, sweeter tone isn’t so much a conversation as a haunting performance piece probing a woman’s psyche, and the result elevates the song’s ache to a level of shattering, shimmering beauty.
If anything, “River” hints that as good as Peyroux sounds on the rest of Half the Perfect World, she’s capable of even more. If Peyroux, only 33, continues to grow as she has through her first three albums, she shows the potential to develop into one of the premiere vocal interpreters of her time.
