Emma Smith, one time Puppini Sister, has established herself over the past decade or so as one of the UK’s most compelling jazz singers, now signed to hip Brooklyn label La Reserve, with Bitter Orange, a new album of classics from the Great American Songbook. The 2024 Parliamentary Jazz Vocalist of the Year launched the album from the stage of Ronnie Scott’s over four sets across two hot, high-summer Soho nights.
She’s got artistry and showbiz all sewn up in one body-sculpting outfit, and between songs delivered very funny, sassy and illuminating asides – best of which was a story about her granddad, who stole a trombone from a music shop while working on the Docks during the war (he paid for it eventually). He went on to become a player in British Army bands, then for the likes of Frank Sinatra and Barbra Streisand and many others. One of Smith’s earliest memories is being on stage with him at Ronnie Scott’s, around the age of three.
Smith’s Bitter Orange comprises 12 songs, and from the opening snippet of “Hey World, Here I Am” through that seasoned drinker’s lament “Make It Another Old Fashioned Please” (the club’s bar obliged) to a ‘lost’ Disney song from Cinderella, “I’m In the Middle of a Muddle” and an existential, expressionist primal take on “Bewitched, Bothered & Bewildered”, it’s a powerful, lived-in reimagining of some very well known songs. On “Bewitched” her vocals dig in and reach into the murky depths of complex passions and emotional hotspots with a mixture of power, force, delicacy and nuance, holding and bending grace notes and bringing out the song’s unspoken emotions.
Along with “Bewitched”, the album peaks with the final three – “Funny Face”, which segues into “My Funny Valentine”, and “Polkadots & Moonbeams”. Here is some of her finest singing to date. It’s rich, deep and delicately nuanced, and she’s ably supported on stage and on record by her regular three-piece of pianist Jamie Safir, bassist Conor Chaplin and drummer Luke Tomlinson on drums. Smith’s Bitter Orange is no forbidden fruit – it’s time to make it one of your five a day.
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