A Rising Young Jazz Singer, Lucy Wijnands, Telegraphs Her Allegiance to Ella Fitzgerald

Lucy Wijnands‘Something Awaits’Lucy Wijnands Music‘Call Me Irresponsible’Night Is Alive Productions LLCRemember Robin Williams as the voice of the Genie in the classic 1992 Disney animated version of “Aladdin”? There’s one line — possibly improvised by the actor — that has the Genie explaining how the wishing process works. Among the ground rules he offers is that “wishing for more wishes” is off-limits. The young jazz singer Lucy Wijnands is evidently familiar with that concept. When Apple Music asked her to name her favorite three albums, she picked two all-time pop-soul classics, Stevie Wonder’s “Songs in the Key of Life” and Earth, Wind & Fire’s “Powerlight.” No argument there. Her third favorite is especially prescient: Ella Fitzgerald’s “Twelve Nights In Hollywood.” This is a brilliant choice, not least because it frees one from the responsibility of choosing. This set, released in 2009 — more than a dozen years after the Great Lady’s death — consists of fully four CDs’ worth of live performances recorded over the course of a two-week run at the Crescendo on Sunset Boulevard in 1962. It contains some 80 tracks, with virtually no repeat songs. If I had to pick only one Ella “album” to take to a desert island, this might well be it, as Fitzgerald is one of the few artists for whom quality and quantity are the same thing. To paraphrase the great lady herself, the only thing better than Ella is more Ella.Ms. Wijnands, who just played a set at New York City’s Birdland, displays the same sort of ingenuity on her own music. She’s currently represented by two releases, a full album, “Call Me Irresponsible,” and a six-song EP, “Something Awaits.” She also has had some exemplary live performances captured on video, such as a 15-minute set from a jazz festival in Holland from a few months ago. At Birdland, Ms. Wijnands telegraphed her allegiance to Ella Fitzgerald with “April in Paris,” which deconstructs and reconstructs the 1932 standard following the pattern of Wild Bill Davis’s iconic arrangement for Count Basie and Fitzgerald’s own reconstruction thereof. At both Birdland and Breda she also sang “Beat Me Daddy, Eight to the Bar,” which in 1940 was one of the first popular songs to adopt the rhythmic idiom known as boogie-woogie style, and which Fitzgerald recorded in 1959.The title of “Beat Me Daddy,” it should be noted, refers to a musical specificity — i.e., beats in a measure — rather than familial abuse. This is an important distinction for the singer because she does indeed sing it to her father, and frequent accompanist, Bram Wijnands. When they first took the stage together, they started with a jazz standard, “The Great City” — frequently sung at Birdland by Eric Comstock — and then a jazzy showtune, “A Lot of Livin’ to Do.” For a few seconds, I wondered about the lack of a bassist and drummer, but their plan quickly became obvious. Mr. Wijnands specializes in ragtime, stride, and boogie-woogie, and the notion of recasting this “Bye Bye Birdie” classic proved both highly original and altogether delightful. The two who wrote it, Charlie Strouse and Lee Adams, are both very much still with us and would have loved it. The late Michel Legrand no doubt would have felt the same regarding their highly pianistic reading of “Watch What Happens.” The two Wijnands also excelled together on a slow and strident reading of Frank Loesser and Jule Styne’s World War II classic, “I Don’t Want to Walk Without You.” Ms. Wijnands’s sole full-length album so far, “Call Me Irresponsible: The Songs of Jimmy Van Heusen,” uses an all-star group of New York players, led by the formidable pianist John DiMartino. Like her contemporaries Samara Joy, Cécile McLorin Salvant, Tatiana Eva-Marie, and others, Ms. Wijnands thoroughly explored the legacies of jazz and the Great American songbook by apparently spending hours trolling through YouTube and digging up forgotten gems of songs that no one has performed in multiple generations. Ms. Wijnands plays “So Help Me,” a rarity from 1938 with lyrics by Eddie DeLange, and “I Could Have Told You,” originally published by Van Heusen under a pseudonym — it’s a long story — the latter being a gorgeous duet with the guitarist Dave Stryker.On the album, she moves between one of the saddest songs written by Van Heusen and his latter-career partner, Sammy Cahn — “Only the Lonely,” a moving reading possibly more inspired by Aretha Franklin than Sinatra — to one of their most cheerful, “The Secret of Christmas,” a rare-ish holiday single by Fitzgerald; both are animated by tenor saxophonist Harry Allen. Then, too, anyone who does any kind of a songbook album, celebrating the works of a single great writer or team, is honoring the legacy of Fitzgerald, who perfected the concept.“The Second Time Around” is delivered as a Count Basie-style romper; at Birdland, she informed us that she was born and raised at Kansas City, the Missouri town that Basie helped establish as a jazz hub. “Deep in a Dream” is another lovely offering from very early in the songwriter’s career, when he was roughly the age that Ms. Wijnands is now; the song isn’t especially rare, but the verse is. She sings it in a relaxed, dreamlike rubato tempo. The same can be said for the title song, the only one of Van Heusen’s four Oscar winners to make it onto the package, done as a slow ballad with verse, enhanced greatly by Mr. Allen.Still, my favorite of her ballads so far is a track on her recent EP, namely “Time Was,” also originally written in 1938, an American lyric by Bob Russell to a Mexican song named “Duerme.” Like many of the numbers in her repertoire, it’s a song that not enough singers do; Ms. Wijnands stretches it out both romantically and rhapsodically, to the point where it’s moving, but not sad; the bassist Omer Avital also gets a poignant solo.Ms. Wijnands, who was born in 1997, clearly has a long and important career ahead of her. “Something Awaits,” thankfully, is readily available on the streaming services, along with half a dozen or so singles. Having this much of Lucy Wijnands to listen to, along with what she has on YouTube, does indeed make me feel like I’ve been granted my wish for more wishes.

A Rising Young Jazz Singer, Lucy Wijnands, Telegraphs Her Allegiance to Ella Fitzgerald

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