Carmela Rappazzo offers a ripple of acoustic guitar, and a cello goes through a darkened nightclub. Then the rest of the small band—sax, accordion and bass—join in with a breezy rhythm as a single spotlight fades up, illuminating a singer on a stool.
“Soon enough the winds grow fierce,” she sings. And here we are, at the start of a song cycle of sorts bringing intimate observations and witty charm.
Well, it’s not hard to imagine that scene with Carmela Rappazzo’s Whispering. There is a cabaret theatricality to it, flowing from that opening, not forced, not in every song, but threading through the words and sounds and manners. And it’s probably no accident that several songs make explicit allusions to acting and pretending, to playing roles.
There’s the Sondheim-esque “The Actor Prepares,” written by Alex McMurray, not about a stage performer, per se, but the acting we all do in life: “The mustache goes back in its case, now here’s the one that no one sees, the blackbird broken in the breeze.” Rappazzo’s conversational singing gives the words a balance of detachment and resignation, matched on this song by cello (plucked this time) and guitar again, joined by a sighing steel guitar.
On the flip side, emotionally, there’s the playful “I Love You For Tonight,” a Fred-and-Ginger-ish duet with Paul Sanchez, who co-wrote the song with John Rankin. “Let’s have a dress rehearsal, let’s make up different lines, let’s get through acts one and two, act three and bend our minds. You can play the part of someone burning for my kiss, Let’s be wise, let’s improvise, let’s both shoot from the hips.” You can almost hear them winking at each other, while, again, the ensemble crafts the scene perfectly: Let’s call the whole thing on…for now, at least.
The friendship of Carmela Rappazzo and Sanchez—they’ve been teaming live regularly, guesting in each other’s sets including gigs at Chickie Wah Wah and Sanchez’s Rolling Road Show slot at Jazz Fest—is at the core of the album. In addition to their duet, there are three songs they wrote together: the opening title song, the forthright “Fun Along the Way” (“I own who I am, I own what I’ve done”) and the dusky “Broken Hearted Artists” (“All the broken-hearted artists, chasing stories from the past”), vignettes carrying wisps of wistfulness and sentimentality sans schmaltz. Well, maybe a little bit of schmaltz.
That’s true for the chamber-jazz accompaniment as well, with cellist Chris Beroes-Haigis, Django-rooted guitarist Russell Welch, accordionist Glenn Hartman (from the New Orleans Klezmer All Stars and Lulu and the Broadsides), Scott Johnson on baritone sax and bass clarinet, Mark Carroll (her husband) on lap steel and Jasen Weaver on bass. It’s quite a shift from last year’s Love & Other Difficulties, which had her with a jazz trio fronted by piano star Oscar Rossignoli. Note that there’s no piano at all on this one (nor drums, for that matter). That works to give the ensemble an elastic freedom, the musicians both collectively and individually able to set the scene, as it were, whether busking along the Seine (Hartmann’s accordion front and center in “I Love You For Tonight”) or stepping down Frenchmen Street (the ensemble swing of “Elysian Fields”).
Ultimately, though, Rappazzo drops all guises, all trappings of performance for the last song, a coda or encore of sorts. In “Lily’s Lullaby,” written for bassist Weaver’s baby girl, she delights in the pure joy of this child while musing on the open promise for whatever roles are ahead for the youngster: “We’ll just wait and see,” she sings, “’til she tells us who she wants to be.”
