Madeleine Peyroux – Half The Perfect World

Madeleine Peyroux, who found international success with 2004’s Careless Love, is often mentioned alongside Norah Jones as a champion of low-key brunch music. Musical menus aside, Peyroux is a much more traditional jazz singer than Jones, and not just because the dry timbre of her voice recalls that of Billie Holiday. Like a great jazz musician, she can spin a phrase and shade a note in a way that casts new light on even the most familiar songs.

Half The Perfect World reunites Peyroux with producer Larry Klein and many of the musicians who played on Careless Love, and the repertoire again mixes originals with well-chosen covers. “I’m All Right”, which Peyroux wrote with Klein and Steely Dan’s Walter Becker, is the most fetching original, with its bubbly tempo playfully underscoring the deadpan lyrics of an affair gone south. On “A Little Bit”, Peyroux’s voice skirts flirtatiously around the melody, while the string quartet on “Once In A While” puts an artful shimmer on a soft blues.

Peyroux finds sure success with two evergreens, Johnny Mercer’s “The Summer Wind” and Charlie Chaplin’s “Smile”. More daring is Fred Neil’s “Everybody’s Talking”, with bass, piano and percussion producing a languid pulse that fairly begs Peyroux to play with her words (dig the “No, I won’t let you leave my love behind” fade).

She has her sensual way with “Blue Alert” and adds a touch of melancholy to the soft rhythms of the title track; both are new Leonard Cohen compositions that also appear on a recent disc by their co-writer, Anjani Thomas. Peyroux trades verses with K.D. Lang on a stunning version of Joni Mitchell’s “River”, and might make you blush when she sings, “He loved me so naughty made me weak in the knees.” Careless Love was clearly not an isolated achievement.