Angela Verbrugge: Somewhere

The proper response to Beauty is an awed admiring silence. So these liner notes should be one word in a large font: LISTEN. But Angela asked me to add a few hundred keystrokes to the project, so here we are. Incidentally, I have chosen to focus on Angela in the midst of the most superb musicians and arrangements. I hope they will forgive me!

Angela Verbrugge is a great subversive. Her work is so quietly insinuating that listeners might easily underestimate it in favor of singers who make their work look arduous. But in every song, she creates singular landscapes of feeling that run parallel with melody and lyrics, as if the songs were sheets of colored tissue paper through which she shines light to make magic shadows on the wall.

In her casual-sounding way, she offers us truths of the heart, urgent and genuine. A gentle authenticity without pretense. Rather than a throbbing vibrato, long-held notes in forests of violins, she offers us a light-hearted tenderness, a speaking naturalness. And she is an elegant improviser, a risk-taker, a great horn-player who doesn't bring a case to the gig.

Her musical range is anything but narrow: on one track, she suggests the Basie band without all those suits and music stands; on another, she serves us a croissant in an imaginary cafe on Boulevard Saint Germain in Paris.

I am so impressed by her light touch with songs that ordinarily lead singers to melodrama. Forgive the domestic metaphor, but it is as if Angela had gone to the laundry room with these songs, put them in the spin-dryer on high heat for a few seconds to remove decades of damp sentimentality, and brought them out, resuscitated.

Her "Craziest Dream" is nearly whimsical ("let me tell you about the weird thing that happened last night!") an interlude of love-making at the breakfast table. "Somewhere" is sweetly sustaining: in her production of West Side Story, Tony and Maria live on and leave the city to sell their own goat cheese, far from skyscrapers. "Born to Be Blue," a self-pitying lament in others' hands, is now a playful duet for voice and piano. "For You, For Me, Forevermore" is a series of airy footsteps through the never-heard verse and chorus.

The one exception is her "If the Moon Turns Green," a 1935 song by Bernie Hanighen, Billie Holiday's friend and advocate. Billie didn't record it when it was new, but Angela's version makes up for that. It is a masterpiece of delicate ardor, and I do not overstate.

LISTEN.