The Ever Ebullient Cyrille Aimée Lights Up Birdland With ‘the Guitar Heroes’

Cyrille Aimée and the Guitar HeroesBirdlandThrough March 23‘à Fleur de Peau’Whirlwind RecordingsCyrille Aimée’s show at Birdland this week is both a bold step forward and an extension of her own tradition. She’s never used quite this lineup before, yet she has a long history of working with guitarists in various combinations. Likewise, she sings a whole new repertoire of insightful originals intermingled with jazz and songbook standards as well as more recent pop hits. She’s sung just about everything, yet she keeps finding new songs to sing.At Birdland, her band — billed as “the Guitar Heroes” — consists of two French guitarists, Michael Valeanu playing electric and Adrien Moignard playing acoustic, who both backed her on the 2015 album “Let’s Get Lost,” as well as the Israeli bassist Tamir Shmerling – switching between the traditional upright instrument and a highly guitar-like six string electric bass – and the Portuguese drummer Pedro Segundo.Guitars are especially significant to Ms. Aimée’s oeuvre. She’s certainly worked more with guitars than any other instrument, including two early albums of voice-and-guitar duets with a talented Brazilian guitarist, Diego Figueiredo. At Birdland, she exploded on stage with “For the love of you.” On her newest album, “à Fleur de Peau,” the Isley Brothers hit is delivered as a slice of bright, funky euro pop, employing electronics but with a significant jazz beat. At Birdland, it was a clarion call to get the party started. Cyrille Aimée. Viktor HlavatovicIndeed, Ms. Aimée ebullience is one of her most salient features. No matter what she’s singing, or whether she’s backed up by strings, horns, or even robots, she is always irresistibly upbeat. Ms. Aimée was born and raised at Samois-sur-Seine, and one gets the impression that a lot of the jazz she heard in her formative years was of the Jazz Manouche variety, the style pioneered by the legendary Django Rheinhardt and associated with the Romany people of the French-speaking nations. Other singers can adapt themselves to this kind of a beat – as they show, for instance, when they guest star with the Reinhardt Festival All-Stars – but Ms. Aimée has it in her bones.A few songs in, she launched into “The Man I Love,” delivered fast and swinging à la Django, to the beat of the famous Quinette of the Hot Club of France pumping rhythm. It built to an ecstatic drum solo by Mr. Segundo that was kind of a party unto itself. Ms. Aimée followed with a slow ballad, “I’ll Be Seeing You.” She didn’t sing the verse, which specifically locates the action of the text at Paris, but nonetheless she accentuated the franglais qualities of this classic American torch song. Even here, she has an optimism that reminds me of the late Tony Bennett: This may be a song of separation, but she’s looking on the bright side; whoever the “you” is on the lyric, she’ll be seeing him soon.There were two familiar songs of a more joyous isolation: Mel Tormé introduced Stephen Sondheim’s “Live Alone and Like It” on the soundtrack of the misbegotten 1990 film “Dick Tracy,” but the song suits Ms. Aimée, who recorded it so perfectly for her 2019 album, “Move On: A Sondheim Adventure,” that it’s hard to shake the notion that it was written expressly for her. The other was Paul Simon’s “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover.” This was funny and rhythmic — the two qualities are closely interconnected in Ms. Aimée’s music — though this was the first time I noticed that for some inexplicable reason, Mr. Simon has only provided us with five different means of lover-leaving. The grand finale of this forward-looking evening was the most traditional song of the night, the 1918 “After You’ve Gone,” which she began, accompanied only by the guitars, with a slyly slow and mirth-filled reading of the verse and the one whole chorus, arriving at a highly erotic stop-time break at the end of the bridge. The ensemble encored with Peggy Lee’s “It’s a Good Day,” and, even though it was 11 p.m., indeed it was.In her spring show at Birdland a year ago, Ms. Aimee was accompanied not only by Messrs. Shmerling, Valeanu, and Segundo but also piano, trumpet, and saxophone. There was one other significant difference from last year’s show: This time, she walked on stage very obviously great-with-child, which didn’t slow her down a bit; in fact, it seemed to make her generally even more upbeat and high-spirited. It’s good to know that she’s delighted to be giving birth to something other than a new album.

The Ever Ebullient Cyrille Aimée Lights Up Birdland With ‘the Guitar Heroes’

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