Greta Matassa: Live at Tula's

Greta Matassa is a Seattle-based jazz singer who evidently has a strong following and some valid credentials from the prestigious Earshot Magazine. This publication named Matassa as Best Female Jazz Vocalist for multiple years in the Pacific Northwest area. This album, recorded live at Tula's, the popular downtown Seattle jazz club, offers thirteen standards backed by her trio.

The session begins promisingly with "Save Your Love From Me" from the Buddy Johnson songbook (but more popularized by the Cannonball Adderley/Nancy Wilson recording) with a nice groove and feeling from the singer. We then get a series of three consecutive ballads, "The Nearness of You," "For All We Know," and "Tenderly"—all good songs, but there's a sameness about them insofar as presentation is concerned. Matassa is an adequate vocalist, and after the brief piano solo, on the first two, she attempts to re-interpret the lyrics. This technique only partially succeeds, as I kept thinking about what Betty Carter et al. would have done.

She fares better on mid-tempo songs like Jobim's adapted "Boy from Ipanema" or the bluesy Redman/Razaf "Ain't I Good to You." The inclusion of the Webster & Burke "Black Coffee," developed here into a stomping down-home blues, is surely Matassa's closer or encore. The lyrics of unrequited love are given a fine toe-tapping presentation but her vocal deteriorates into histrionics as Matassa enacts the last chorus replete with lots of melisma and vocal swoops that you might expect from an R&B diva. I'm sure that it plays out better in person than on disc.

Pianist Randy Halberstadt provides empathetic support and really gets to shine on the blues-based numbers like "Black Coffee" and "Ain't I Good to You" and bassist Clipper Anderson gets in some solo work in "I've Got You Under My Skin."

Note: this album was recorded in multi-channel SACD.