Emilie-Claire Barlow
‘Spark Bird’ (Empress Music Group)

“Hope,” as Emily Dickinson famously said, “is the thing with feathers.” I’ve always loved Carmen McRae’s 1958 album “Birds of a Feather,” which consists of 12 songs about skylarks, nightingales, meadowlarks, flamingoes, eagles, sparrows, swallows, and even a chicken or two. Even if you happen to think the subject matter is strictly for the birds, this is inarguably a great album.  

Here’s one of the greatest singers in all of jazz, singing a dozen mostly excellent standards, with arrangements by Ralph Burns, one of the all-time truly talented musical directors, played by an all-star band. Yet I have also known a few very serious, hardcore jazz fans who actually regard “Birds of a Feather” as one of the goofiest records ever made by a major musician or singer. 

This is not least because the cover shows McRae standing adjacent to a pair of blue parakeets, obviously inserted into the image via the 1958 analog equivalent of photoshop. Yet strangely enough, I can’t think of any other important singer who has returned to this avian topic in at least 65 years. Now, the Canadian vocalist Emilie-Claire Barlow has released “Spark Bird,” which is a similar idea but with key differences.

For one thing, it was kind of assumed back in 1958 that Carmen McRae didn’t particularly care personally about chicks and ducks and geese. Rather, this was the moment of a kind of an arms race in the record business, when producers were trying to outdo each other by coming up with bizarro themes for concept albums that no one else had yet thought of.  

Unlike McRae, Ms. Barlow was very much inspired by the actual birds themselves. As she says in an article at Birdwatching.com, it was the sight of a Yellow-winged Cacique, which she spotted while on a vacation on the west coast of Mexico, that sparked her enthusiasm, and led her to the idea of not only watching and photographing birds, but singing about them. This was important to her, she writes, in that after not having made an album in five years (after making 12 between 1998 and 2017) this gave her the necessary post-pandemic motivation to get back in the studio. 

Ms. Barlow was also determined to launch the album in her first ever engagement in New York — at Birdland, where else? The 2023 “Spark Bird” also differs from the 1958 “Birds of a Feather” in that Ms. Barlow has specifically expanded the purview — it’s not only songs specifically about birds, but now any song that makes a prominent reference to birds is fair game.  

Hence, when she opens the album with “Over the Rainbow,” it’s no longer a song just about rainbows; now it’s primarily about those bluebirds who fly over them, and it sounds like a different song, no longer a ballad or an anthem. This isn’t the first time it’s been reconfigured as a bossa nova, but now, more than ever, it seems like it’s not about anything so much as dancing, which should be taken as a metaphor for flying, as in what those bluebirds do. 

Ms. Barlow grew up in Toronto, and as French is mandatory throughout Canada, she does several songs in that language, including a few that also use Brazilian beats. “Fais comme l’oiseau” (“Do like the birds”) is a bright, bouncy bossa whose ebullient rhythms do indeed suggest a red-red-robin in flight. The other foreign language song, the Spanish “Pájaros de Barro,” is just the opposite. Upon hearing this final track, which features Ms. Barlow with solo piano accompaniment only, my first reaction was that it was sort of a bleak note to end on, but a Spanish translation informs me that it’s actually a rather poetic text about clay birds wanting to fly.  

Stevie Wonder’s “Bird of Beauty” has a bossa nova element and a Portuguese lyric already built into its DNA. Also from the pop world, Coldplay’s “O” employs trumpet (Rachel Therrien) and a small string section along with veteran drummer Ben Riley, and starts with the image of “a flock of bird” to make a larger statement about the natural world. “O” leads directly into a brand new song, “Where Will I Be,” which is a kind of “Silent Spring” contemplation of the end of nature (“Where will I be when there is no more rain?”), written and played for Ms. Barlow by Toronto songwriter Hannah Barstow. It would work well in a medley with Sondheim’s “I Remember” 

The Gershwin brothers’ “Little Jazz Bird,” which she probably learned from Blossom Dearie, is cute and perky, even after being bopped up with a vocalese chorus, meaning to write and sing lyrics on top of an instrumental solo. The only other traditional standard is “Skylark,” whose famously soaring melody by Hoagy Carmichael is the only song here repeated from “Birds of a Feather.” 

“Spark Bird” is an excellent album, my second favorite of hers after the 2010 “The Beat Goes On,” a set of jazzy retakes on 1960s pop hits. Ms. Barlow is supported by a fine band of Toronto-based players, including pianist Amanda Tosoff, guitarist Reg Schwager, bassist Jon Maharaja, and drummer Fabio Ragnelli.

Tenor saxophonist Kelly Jefferson also plays on many numbers, and his presence is significant in that one of the great tenor men of all time played on “Birds of a Feather” in 1958. However, he was credited on the original back cover as “A. Tenorman,” and you have to consult a discography to learn that it was actually the legendary Ben Webster. But rest assured, he had to resort to the pseudonym because of contractual reasons, not that he had any bias against our fine feathered friends.