Allyson Briggs: Promises, Promises and Raindrops

Allyson Briggs describes herself as an "old soul" who connected almost instinctively to the music of the 1970s. Her models are Tony Bennett and Ella Fitzgerald, bearers of a very different musical culture than what is currently on offer. She is part of a different era, of not exactly big band singers, but of the sort that emerged from that scene. Her work is tasteful, swinging and familiar in a good way. A kind of quintessential New York club singer, hardly extinct, but typical only of a certain milieu. If this is the repertoire one seeks, Ms Briggs is certainly entertaining. She is hardly a newcomer to the scene, but is perhaps, not exactly a household name with an enormous following.

Here Briggs is doing Hal David and Burt Bacharach—where "jazz meets pop" and she is doing it very well and no apologies. This is a trip down memory lane, intentionally so. Briggs says "I hope to provide a light in the dark, a calm respite to soothe the soul. We need some nostalgia, we need joy, we need more love." A cynic—and there are plenty of them—might respond that the good old days of the Vietnam War and the Pentagon Papers require a degree of suspended disbelief to conjure up, but that seems churlish. There is always time for beauty and if someone does not think "I Say a Little Prayer for You" is anything other than a sweet song, that is their problem, not Briggs.' Briggs covers a wide variety of artists from Herb Alpert to Dionne Warwick, and her interpretations are generally right down the middle. She relies on accurate intonation and a fetching voice—no drama, really, except, perhaps on songs like "Walk on By" where the lyric is painful. Her rendition of "Alfie" is spot on and can bring on an acute desire to see the original 1966 Michael Caine film: the song is something of an ode to a cad—when was the last time that word appeared in print? "The Look of Love" is a torch song, and Briggs does it justice, a romantic song from a time when delayed gratification was a thing.

Virtually all the tracks come in around three or four minutes, a sensible choice that other singers of standards would be well to emulate. Briggs' band, especially trumpet Andy Warren, sets just the right mood, a sort of Rainbow Room standard that a listener could expect someone like Rosemary Clooney to sing. This is a very nice job indeed by a person who has a good idea of what a genuine jazz singer once sounded like, and that the world in which she sang is now largely gone.

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