JULIE KELLY

Freedom Jazz Dance

Kelly, vocals; Josh Nelson, piano, keyboard; Larry Koonse, guitar; five others Laurelwood LW3088 (auditioned as CD). 2024. Josh Nelson, Barbara Brighton, prods.; Talley Sherwood, Harriet Tam, engs. PERFORMANCE

SONICS

Talented jazz singers are never in short supply. The trick is to find one who moves you. Currently, two of the most acclaimed, Jazzmeia Horn and Samara Joy, possess extraordinary vocal instruments, but they sometimes seem more interested in displaying their chops than telling a story, much less breaking your heart.

Julie Kelly is none of the above. She is not new. She began performing in public in the 1970s. She is insufficiently acclaimed. She does not have a set of pipes that can blow the windows out of auditoriums. But she has the kind of voice you want to spend time with. It projects qualities that are in short supply, like personality and integrity.

You could enjoy such a voice singing any good song, but Kelly finds songs that sound meant for her. Sting’s “Practical Arrangement” is a dry-eyed, unsentimental love song. “Sunday in New York,” by Peter Nero and Carroll Coates, is one of the most joyful of the world’s countless New York songs. Kelly’s rejection of sentimentality makes her credible on the subject of joy.

Where Kelly truly shines is on relatively familiar material like Gordon Lightfoot’s “Early Morning Rain.” When you hear it interpreted by her lived-in, streetwise voice, you feel you finally understand the tune. Her mashup of Willie Nelson’s “Funny How Time Slips Away” and Bill Withers’s “Hello Like Before” deepens both by making them one story. The songs by Lightfoot and Nelson and Withers demonstrate that Kelly is an artist with range: She can portray joy, but she can also render complex feelings like sadness tempered by irony and resignation.

This album has two other virtues: elegant arrangements by Josh Nelson and crystalline sound by Talley Sherwood and Harriet Tam.