Another Time, Another Listen

Meredith d’Ambrosio's second album from 1981, Another Time, is a perfect object, absolutely one of a kind. Her voice is low in range but light in affect. She's clearly a saloon singer, someone used to delivering torch songs to the accompaniment of booze and cigarettes, but somehow her presentation is totally innocent nonetheless. Evelyn Waugh said that P.G. Wodehouse's stories existed in Eden before the Fall. In d’Ambrosio's hands, even adult songs like "Lazy Afternoon" lack any suggestion of sin. At the piano, she works over the material, pruning and shaping, finding a personal interpretation for the accompaniment. The diatonic chime of her reharmonizations occasionally recalls a child's music box, but there's also just enough of Bill Evans' added-tone colors to satisfy the experienced listener. Each song is under three minutes. The lyric drives her aesthetic. She searches out songs that tell a certain kind of story from composers and lyricists of a certain kind of sophisticated bent-notably seven pieces from Alec Wilder, including his lyric to Thad Jones and Roland Hanna's "A Child Is Born." Three effervescent Dave Frishberg songs help define the narrative aspect of the disc; her own amusing piece "The Piano Player (A Thousand and One Saloons)" is right in Frishberg storytelling tradition. Some of what I've written so far might suggest that d’Ambrosia is a musical-theatre or cabaret singer. That's not true: She's a jazz singer. The way her voice flexibly phrases over the beat on the intentionally naive teen prayer "Someday My Prince Will Come" displays serious rhythmic know-how. Still, D'Ambrosia is certainly not just for regular jazz listeners; she's for anyone attuned to the right wavelength. Her producer at Sunnyside Records, François Zalacain, tells the story of a truck driver from middle America who called the company. This gentleman rarely gave jazz much of a chance, but he had heard something from Another Time on the radio, and wanted the album on cassette so he could listen while driving the big rig, especially when it was raining. (Zalacain had to explain that Sunnyside didn't make cassettes any more, but was happy to sell him a CD.) Another Time is one of 16 stellar d’Ambrosia discs on Sunnyside. She plays piano on many of these albums, but legendary accompanists like Fred Hersch, Harold Danko, Lee Musiker, and even Hank Jones also appear supporting the singer. Her late husband Eddie Higgins was a great pianist too, and their collaborations have remarkable simpatico. Not content with being a lnaster musician, d’Ambrosia is also a master painter, specializing in critically acclaimed watercolors, and even innovated a genre of visual art, eggshell mosaics. Her helpful website declares her to be a "Renaissance woman." A new d’Ambrosia album on Sunnyside will be released in February 2021. JT