Naama Gheber: I’m A Fool To Want You

Vocalist Naama Gheber is applying a different paradigm to the release of her second recording, the EP If I Knew Then, presently due for release in November 2022. She previously released the single "Old Mother Hubbard" and now follows it with a starkly fashioned "I'm A Fool To Want You." Gheber released her debut recording Dearly Beloved (Cellar Live) in early 2020. It received considerable attention within All About Jazz and other outlets. The talent revealed rivals that of Veronica Swift, Cecile McLorin Salvant, and Jane Monheit while remaining firmly in traditional jazz vocals mode.

"I'm A Fool To Want You" was composed by Frank Sinatra, Jack Wolf, and Joel Herron, originally released in 1951 on the Columbia 78, 39425. The song ostensibly was written about Ava Gardner, with whom Sinatra was having a very public affair, one that badly damaged his family and career at the time. It became one of Sinatra's most popular performance songs. But it is another performance of the song that informs Gheber's performance, that of Billie Holiday on her near valedictory Lady In Satin (Columbia, 1958). Here, Holiday was singing on fumes, all grit, and emotion. Her voice shot, closing in on the end (she was to die of cirrhosis a year later), Holiday demonstrated how the consummate artist concludes...never with the expectation that is what she was doing.

Gheber distills Holiday's plush, orchestra-driven performance to the small concentrated confines of the jazz singer supported only by piano. Pianist Ben Paterson establishes a darkly hewn environment of regret that Gehber readily inhabits, channeling Holiday's resigned phrasing ever so lightly. Gheber's voice is well-balanced presenting the self sympathy, resignation, and crushing loss as densely realized experiences. Gheber's performance could serve as an appropriate preamble to what happens to the protagonist of Billy Strayhorn's "Lush Life," the bitter end of an evolution toward loss and despair. This is what the best singing accomplishes.