Review by Des Cowley.
Bonnie J Jensen – Rise (Independent, CD & digital release)
Singer Bonnie J Jensen has cast her net widely with fifth outing Rise. New Zealand born, but Sydney-based, her work stands out – over and above her vocal prowess – for the calibre of musicians she’s routinely mustered to enrich her records, including Alister Spence, Miroslav Bukovsky, James Morrison, Jonathan Zwartz, James Muller, Phil Stack. Rise continues the tradition, boasting standout contributions from pianist Matt McMahon, guitarist Geoff Hughes, bassist Brett Hirst, drummer Nicholas McBride, among others.
From the get-go, there’s a carefree, relaxed flow about this music, highlighting Jensen’s sultry vocals, and her capacity for putting a new spin on well-trod standards. These strengths come to the fore on the album’s penultimate track, Herbie Hancock’s ‘Butterfly’ (with lyrics by his sister Jean). McMahon’s lush piano, overlaid by Graham Jesse’s flute, manifests a neo soul vibe, with Jensen’s voice, smooth as silk, drifting and gliding across the song’s melancholic undercurrent. She further expands the Hancock tie-in with a rendition of his classic ‘Cantaloupe Island’, featuring lyrics by Mark Murphy. Vaunting a full band arrangement, Graham Jesse’s ‘in the pocket’ arrangement is elevated by McMahon’s laconic piano vamp, and Simon Ferenci’s smouldering trumpet.
Jensen proves herself amenable to injecting a touch of swing to proceedings, heard to best effect on Curtis Lewis’s ‘The Great City’, which conjures Joni Mitchell’s spirited and playful cover of the Wardell Gray/Annie Ross vocalese ‘Twisted’, replete with Jensen’s sassy vocals, and Ray Cassar’s muted trumpet. She reprises the mood on her own composition ‘Spend a Little Time with Me’, wrapping her vocals around the song’s brassy theme, as she stretches and collapses the song’s lyrics. Sting’s ‘La Belle Dame Sans Regret’, on the other hand, with its hip Latin backbeat, is given a chanteuse makeover that could have been lifted straight from a nouvelle vague sixties film.
Arguably the pick-of-the-bunch is Jensen’s seven-minute take on Chick Corea’s ‘Spain’, a rollercoaster ride that finds her trickily navigating the song’s complex rhythms, which careen wildly between plaintive and ebullient. The album closes with James Taylor’s ‘Don’t Let Me be Lonely Tonight’, with Jensen proffering a mellow and cruisy reading that amplifies the song’s late-night, sad-eyed wistfulness.
While Rise is enhanced by cool and snazzy arrangements, Jensen is first and foremost a singer and interpreter. Steering clear of the pyrotechnic scatting of traditional jazz singers such as Ella Fitzgerald, her approach is foregrounded in the art of song-craft, mining a rich seam of jazz vocalists embodied by the likes of Holly Cole, Claire Martin, Diana Krall, and Patricia Barber. On the evidence of Rise, Jensen warrants being cited in their company.