In 2009,
Madeleine Peyroux issued
Bare Bones, her first recording of all-original material with producer
Larry Klein and a small group of jazz musicians and co-composers.
Standing on the Rooftop is her debut recording for
Decca with producer
Craig Street. The group of players here is a diverse lot: drummer
Charlie Drayton, guitarists
Christopher Bruce and
Marc Ribot, bassist
Me'Shell Ndegeocello;
John Kirby,
Glenn Patscha, and
Patrick Warren alternate on keyboards, percussionist
Mauro Refosco, violinist
Jenny Scheinman, and
Allen Toussaint guests on piano. The program is richly and elegantly painted with modern production touches even as its songs are rooted in the historical past of classic Americana: pop songs, blues, jazz, and sitting room tunes. It includes eight originals and four covers, among them a poem by
W.H. Auden set to music by
Ribot entitled "Lay Your Sleeping Head, My Love." The music is summery and laid-back. The languid parlor-room reading of "Martha My Dear" by
Lennon &
McCartney has a deliberate old-timey feel and twins well with "Fickle Dove" (one of two
Peyroux tunes written with
Scheinman).
Robert Johnson's "Love in Vain," with its strange pump organ backdrop and studio echo, indulges the kinds of production tricks
Tom Waits might employ in disguising a blues. That said, this song too has a twin of sorts in the sonically similar title track; a clattering rag blues with ambient electronics held in check by
Peyroux's elegantly earthy vocal.
Ribot's acoustic guitar and
Toussaint's upright on the
Auden poem give the singer a perfectly loose frame to create a song inside. The thin, lean, funky blues on "The Kind You Can't Afford" (co-written with former
Rolling Stone Bill Wyman) and
Bob Dylan's "I Threw It All Away" are both slow shuffles and high points. In the latter,
Peyroux's voice shifts the lyric's meaning to where the implied bitterness gives way to bewilderment. The album's final three cuts, "Meet Me in Rio," "Ophelia," and "The Way of All Things" make fine use of
Peyroux's jazz chops; and because of
Street's production, make an exact time-space continuum wonderfully imprecise. As an album,
Standing on the Rooftop may not be as striking as its predecessor, but perhaps it wasn't meant to be. It is a seemingly effort that pushes the familiar toward an uncertain future where pop genres cease to need to exist at all. ~ Thom Jurek
