The folks at the always delightful Turtle Bay Records – a label where the best jazz players of today play the best tunes of yesterday – have done it again with the incredible sensual stylish yet also playful and dramatic vocalist Hannah Gill, who dropped her first TBR album Everybody Loves a Lover in 2023.
When it comes to holiday music, the most obvious thing for an up-and- coming artist to do is record a Christmas album – but the ever-crafty and adventurous Gill has something cooler, offbeat and “ooky” up her sleeve on her latest album whose title – Spooky Jazz, Vol. 2 - says it all about its aesthetic and intentions. An eclectic and whimsy-filled follow-up to and extension of her independently released pandemic era EP Spooky Jazz, Vol. 2 will inspire many Google searches for original versions as it luxuriates in its uniqueness while being deliciously all over the map stylistically.
Besides the snazzy horn arrangements and solo and ensemble action by seven greats from the Turtle Bay roster, perhaps the freshest aspect of the Vol. 2 is the fact that probably only one song – a speedy swing through “That Old Black Magic” – is instantly familiar to jazz and Great American Songbook fans. Gill brings her trademark sassiness, wit and charming theatricality to the rest of these tunes, ghoulishly animating, such tunes as Danny Elfman’s energetic piano driven The Nightmare Before Christmas romp “Oogie Boogie’s Song,” Eartha Kitt’s gleefully defiant “I’d Rather Be Burned as a Witch” and the barnburner “My Man’s an Undertaker.”
Though songs like the bluesy ballad “You Hurt Me” are not Halloween specific, others like Bessie Smith’s eerie “Haunted House Blues” seem tailor made for Gill’s ultimate Halloween party playlist. Though it’s also not perfectly in synch with the film, Gill’s self-conscious choice of the Ella Fitzgerald gem “Hard Hearted Hannah” is perhaps giving us an ever so clever sliver of the singer’s autobiography.
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