A Rare Bass-and-Vocals Album and a Joe’s Pub Release Show from Kavita Shah and François Moutin

Considering that singer Sheila Jordan has made bass-and-vocal duets such an integral part of her hall of fame career, it’s no surprise that her protegee, Kavita Shah would release an album full of them. Most of the tracks on her latest release, Interplay – streaming at Spotify – are duo arrangements with bassist François Moutin. The two are playing the album release show this May 30 at 7 PM at Joe’s Pub; cover is $20.

Beyond Jordan’s obsession with the format, recordings of just bass and voice are rare. It’s impossible to know for sure, but bass-and-vocals albums are even rarer: Jordan’s catalog included, it’s hard to imagine more than a couple dozen of them ever having been made. Two from recent years are especially noteworthy. Singer Lauren Lee’s Velocity Duo with bassist Charley Sabatino put out an especially playful one, Dichotomies, in 2015. The benchmark for the format, at least in this century, belongs to singer Jen Shyu and bassist Mark Dresser’s transcendent, phantasmagorical 2011 release, Synastry. How does the new one by Shah and Moutin compare?

For one, it’s more of a study in contrasting voices – Moutin percolating and Shah simmering alongside – than an attempt to pull together a cohesive whole. And it’s a mix of originals and standards. The duo open with one of the latter, You Go to My Head, which is all about dichotomies, in this case Shah’s assertively full-throated, bittersweet delivery against Moutin’s tightly unclustering lines that veer in and out of swing time. Their take of La Vie En Rose follows the same format, if more swingingly, at least until Shah starts scatting and then Moutin takes a bubbly, straightforward solo.

The first of the originals, Coming Yesterday pairs Shah’s energetic airiness against ageless nonagenariian pianist and longtime Moutin collaborator Martial Solal’s alternately saturnine and sprightly piano. Moutin incisively shadows Shah’s stately delivery throughout the catchy, recurrent vocal riffage of Bliss. The contrast in Falling in Love with Love, one of the more contiguous numbers, is between Shah’s blissful interpretation versus Jordan’s grittier approach – at 89, she can still hit the high notes!

A Shah original, Aigue Marine also features Solal’s uneasy close harmonies behind her tropical angst; it’s the album’s strongest track. Her resonance and melismas over Moutin’s stabbing pulse in Dafnis Prieto’s Blah Blah carry its tango-jazz intensity with full-band power. Similarly, the album’s most retro number, Utopian Vision, has plenty of swing and gusto despite the stripped-down setup.

Shah’s steady vocalese pairs with Moutin’s strolling lines in the album’s title track, up to a jauntily flurrying bass solo. Shah vamps on ukulele in the tropical-flavored The Provider’s Gone. The album closes with Peace, another collaboration with Jordan, shifting in and out of waltz time, Shah the ingenue alongside her mentor’s calm, wise intonation.

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