Seven out of the 11 tracks on Open are Eade originals, and they blend that singer-songwriter side and her jazz side with uncommon grace. “Go Gently to the Water” has a hymnal feel, and “Open Letter” leans toward Joni Mitchell — but then, Mitchell is the jazziest of the singer-songwriters, and Eade takes a left turn on the bridge with a nod toward Jobim’s “One Note Samba.” The twists and turns and odd structure of “Ct Bridge” and “Series of One” are a match for her typically unusual choice from the American Songbook repertoire, Cy Coleman & Carolyn Leigh’s “You Fascinate Me So.” And Wilson brought Leonard Cohen’s “In My Secret Life” to the session.
Eade’s singing is typified by humor, daring, control, and honesty. She doesn’t trick up the emotions in her songs with exaggerated “jazzy” syncopations or “soulful” melismas. On the verse of “Series of One” she doesn’t seem to draw a breath, but it’s got to be in there somewhere — the “series” of revelations is meant to be a breathless “one.” Her vocal control is perfect for Leigh’s witty lyrics, as when she jumps up in register from the title phrase to sing, “I feel like Christopher Columbus when I’m near enough to contemplate the sweet geography descending from your eyebrow to your toes.” When “fascinate” morphs into the comic “aggravate” and “irritate” in the final chorus, she doesn’t go for the Broadway hard sell but lets her sure carriage of the melody and the text and her simpático with Wilson deliver the message.
“There are different ways of communicating those things in different genres. In a Broadway or cabaret style of singing, the standards that we jazz singers sing take on a different life. And there’s an art to that — to making a song climax exactly in the right place where it’s supposed to climax. But I think the reason that doesn’t work so well in jazz is because it’s not just about the singer’s journey, it’s about everybody who’s on board’s journey, whether it’s just me and Jed or a larger ensemble. And to me that’s what’s interesting to listen to in a jazz singer — how the whole piece takes shape in the moment.” After some thought she adds, “If you think of Billie Holiday singing ‘All of Me,’ she makes us feel a million different things about that lyric. And it comes from pulling from her influences — Louis Armstrong, Mildred Bailey, Bessie Smith. But you also hear what’s in the air at the time — you hear her relationship to the people she’s playing with. And I think that makes for a very different kind of emotional delivery.”
Open was also a chance for her to combine the direct expression and simplicity of the singer-songwriter tradition with the harmonic and structural sophistication of jazz. “I think jazz is very communicative, so it made me sad to feel like that might be lost in some way — in my own language. I mean, whatever jazz is doing out there on its own, it’s doing fine, but in my own language, I wanted to make sure that I wasn’t losing people with complexity, but I didn’t want to lose the complexity necessarily either.
