Caught in the Carousel

Melody Gardot

Worrisome Heart

You would be best served if you approached Melody Gardot's CD Worrisome Heart without reading her backstory. I would be better served if I bought stock in Starbuck's just before the release of any Norah Jones CD. Odds are, though, that neither is going to happen.

Let's just say that Gardot has been through a lengthy bout with adversity, and she's come out the winner. For now. Her voice is rangier than Jones (to whom she is compared ad nauseum), but there is a real depth to her voice and lyrics and arrangements that is sorely lacking from Ms. Jones. Yes, a number of these tracks run the gamut from average ("Goodnight" and "Quiet Fire') to sophomoric attempts at quick entrance into Jazz royalty ("Gone"), but there are a few tracks such as "One Day" and the title track that hint at a solid future.

And then there is the track "Love Me Like a River Does," wherein Gardot sheds all the comparisons that seem to follow her (Norah Jones, Tom Waits, Billie Holiday) and puts her in the company of the two greatest jazz vocalists: Shirley Horn and Jimmy Scott. Slowly, slowly, she glides down the path laid by the piano, avoids the flickering candles, the unexpected and glancing shout of a trumpet and pleads: "Love me like a roaring sea/Swirls a boat/Love me like a roaring sea/Wash me out/Love me like a roaring sea/Baby don't rush." It's the album's masterstroke. Vocally she is stretching the taffy in a manner that would make Horn and Scott proud. When her voice is stretched thinnest, when it is most vulnerable, she sings, "Love me like the earth itself," and the world seems just then to have never been a place of daylight, only endless hours of night skies lit with diamonds instead of stars, the face of who you love offering more light than the moon itself; that world there, suspended forever in that ambient air rushing in and out of barely-parted lips.

—Thomas Cooney