The Newest Jazz Singer

  • Could there be a better time to be Jane Monheit? She's young, she's great looking, she's the hottest thing in jazz since the Ken Burns series ended--it has ended, hasn't it?--and the only thing difficult in her life, she says, is "being an adult."

    Yet even that shouldn't prove so hard if one of the measures of adulthood is accomplishment. The 23-year-old singer's first album, last year's Never Never Land, has sold more than 60,000 copies, a number which might not seem special to Janet Jackson, but to a jazz artist has the same sweet sound that "NASDAQ up 100 points" has for a day trader. Last week her brand-new CD, Come Dream with Me (N-Coded Music), hit the No. 1 spot on the Billboard jazz chart immediately upon its release. She has a jazz drummer fiance, her parents love and support her, and her career is backed by an all-star squad of management, publicity and production pros, as well as sidemen straight from the first team: pianist Kenny Barron, bassist Christian McBride, saxophonist Michael Brecker. Most of all, her voice is a silken, controlled wonder that is both a genetic gift and the product of superb training. When she wraps it around one of the classic American songs she loves to sing, you know Jane Monheit can't miss. She has, in a word, everything.

    But that's a cardinal sin in the bumptious, peevish world of jazz, where, as it's said about academic politics, the knives are so sharp because the stakes are so low. The grievance? Along comes a young, good-looking, white jazz singer who mostly performs familiar standards and stays pretty close to the melody--Diana Krall was the last such transgressor--and an entire generation of innovators gets ignored. Sad to say, this is absolutely accurate. It's also irrelevant--this kid can sing.

    It's hard to imagine so much controversy provoked by a young woman who shuffles around the recording studio in fluffy red slippers, looking like a teenager on a sleepover at a girlfriend's house. Professionally, though, she's maturing fast. For one thing, Monheit knows how not to let her critics get any traction. What did she think about a particularly rough piece in the New York Times magazine last December? "I learn something from everyone who writes about me," she says, with hardly any coyness.

    But the most vivid evidence of her quickening maturity rests in her singing. If you heard her a year ago, then four months ago, and then this week, you might find it hard to believe it's all one performer. In her live appearances, Monheit has moved from visible self-consciousness to something close to comfortable; on her recordings, she's crossing into territory she never could have traversed successfully only months ago. Saxophonist Brecker, a seven-time Grammy winner, says, "From the moment I walked into the studio and heard her sing, I sensed I was in the presence of a major new talent. Jane has an amazing set of pipes, and she knows music."

    Monheit grew up on Long Island, N.Y., the child of musicians who discovered her perfect pitch when she was in grade school, and the student of teachers quickly nonplussed by a nine-year-old who wanted to talk about Ella Fitzgerald. At the Manhattan School of Music she fell under the tutelage of singer/arranger Peter Eldridge, who helped her shine her already polished skills.

    Now, on the new disc, they glow. Monheit amiably swings Hit the Road to Dreamland and swoops and soars very nicely through So Many Stars. But it's on an exceptional Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most and several other slow-tempo cuts that she demonstrates an emotional ripeness barely present on her first CD. It's true that she sometimes doesn't get terribly deep into the lyrics, particularly on Antonio Carlos Jobim's soul-divining Waters of March--but what 23-year-old could?

    Still, if words occasionally seem beside the point for Monheit, as they almost always were for her idol Fitzgerald, her musical skill and taste do not fail her. Just three years ago she was working happy hours in nearly empty New York City clubs for tip money. "If I was lucky," she recalls, "it would cover the subway fare." Today in the midst of a daunting 13-city tour, as she charges from coast to coast fueled by the success of her new CD, she's about to break through the narrow walls of the jazz world. Count on this: when she does, the carpers and complainers will say that she was never a jazz singer in the first place. But they'll be wrong.