#a-side

Blake is long been renowned not just for his singular approach to harmony but for his propensity to combine interesting emotional or even theatrical elements. Lee, a vocalist who remains woefully under-appreciated, knew just what to do in almost every circumstance. She might play it straight, following a rhythm or a phrase unvaryingly. Or she could just as easily draw things out to improbable length and duration, or invest a lyric with unexpected dimensions. That they do this with material that is so very conventional, and has so many firm expectations, makes their music even more challenging and beautiful.  

There are plenty of places to study Blake, and sometimes Lee, alone. On “Honeysuckle Rose,” Blake really turns the piano canon inside out, all space and odd phrasing. He plays spiky and abstract on “The Frog, The Fountain, and Aunt June, and more Monkishly on “Smoke After Smoke.” “God’s Image” is spindly and spacious, while “Birmingham, U.S.A.” moves through extreme contrasts in register and dynamics, from brashly noisy to tensely silent. Lee’s lone solo piece is a lovely, soulful “Billie’s Blues.”  

But the main ingredients are elsewhere. There are wonders everywhere, but a few tracks best capture the intensity and wonder of this duo’s music. Take the evergreen “Caravan,” for example. With one of the most familiar themes and tempos in all of jazz, it’s a tune that might seem resistant to much innovation. Not here. Lee and Blake manage to turn it into a tone poem, somehow without obliterating the unmistakable rhythmic language. Blake is sly with tempo and harmony, elliptical where “Caravan” is usually emphatic, and Lee just glides through marvelously, nailing the low end and always, always floating beyond the pulse. “Blue Monk” is given a spiky, mutated opening, and becomes further unpredictable from there: weirdly florid in places and loping in others, the one constant being Lee’s extraordinary vocalese. It’s like that with the standards. They find unexpected darkness in Leonard Bernstein’s “Something’s Coming.” They coax discordance and disorientation from “Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most.” There’s a riveting, elastic take on Ornette Coleman’s “Lonely Woman.” And, perhaps wildest of all, they do a punishing version of the Beatles’ “Hard Day’s Night.” (They also do a fine “Mr. Tambourine Man.”)  

It is spacious music, but also contains depths. It is lithe and lyrical, except where it is arcane and harmonically arch. It is whisper-soft, then declamatory. And oh, Jeanne Lee, who can conjure darkness, playfulness, regret, and sass in a single note. Francis Bacon wrote, centuries ago, “There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.” Lee and Blake didn’t merely understand this; it was the substance of their glorious music.