Frederica von Stade is no stranger to crossover projects. Witness "Show Boat," "On the Town" and naming her own daughter after the Barbra Streisand song (and longtime von Stade encore) "Jenny Rebecca."
Well, Jenny herself shows up on this new Telarc disc, joining her mother in the title song of what I believe is the latter's first jazz album. And it's something of a family affair in other ways, too, involving not only the Brubecks - composers Dave and son Chris and, among the performers, Chris' brother Dan - but father and son Frank and Joel Brown.Nonetheless it is folksinger Bill Crofut who seems to have put this package together, and fittingly he too can be heard on a few of the 13 cuts.
Those consist of six songs by Dave Brubeck, five by Chris, one by Jeff Jones and an arrangement of "La Paloma Azul" deriving from the elder Brubeck's 1967 tour of Mexico.
To the 12 she sings on, von Stade brings, if not a seasoned jazz style, an easygoing lilt and appreciation of the music's haunting, after-hours quality. Take the opening cut, Chris' "The Distance Between Us," with its unpressured flow, or "La Paloma," in which her smoky mezzo can be heard caressing the words in wonderfully idiomatic fashion.
Dave's "Strange Meadowlark" calls forth a higher, more disembodied sound - the angelic von Stade most of us know from her recitals - as does the lullabylike duet with daughter Jenny, here affectingly tremulous.
Crofut joins her - or vice versa - for "Summer Song" and, with Chris, the bouncy "Polly" and "Blue Rondo - A Tribute to Dave," a vocal version of the latter's "Blue Rondo a la Turk." But while the addition of words to the first nicely underlines its "Lulu's Back in Town" character, "Blue Rondo" still seems to me more successful as an instrumental (a sentiment, interestingly enough, expressed in the lyrics themselves).
Elsewhere von Stade's stylistic sense brings a Franco-Russian quality to "Autumn in Our Town" and a clever "Rosenkavalier" interpolation in "It's a Raggy Waltz" (additionally spiced by Crofut's banjo). And is it my imagination or is the same theme recalled, in minor-key fashion, in Chris' lovely "Heart of Winter," which immediately follows?
To my ears the instrumental ensemble could be tighter in places. But the relaxed quality enhances the subtle charms of the more intimate numbers (e.g., Chris' "Lonely on Both Ends of the Road"), as does von Stade's softly focused singing, as though she were singing quietly just to Jenny - and to us.