Cool

For most artists, the obligatory Tin Pan Alley standards album usually coincides with their qualification for a free bus pass. Joyce may be of pensionable age but her take on jazz is still defiantly unique. Musing on her inspiration for this album, she describes how ‘Cole Porter's call girl became a hooker from Bahia’: she's talking about Porter's classic ‘Love for Sale’. It's by far the most striking interpretation here, opening the album on a froth of guitar and piano, cut loose from the original's world-weary cynicism. Conversely, she turns the Jamaican folk standard, ‘Day-O (The Banana Boat Song)’ into a thing of melancholy – perhaps not so difficult for a singer presumably well aware of Brazil's own history of plantation slavery. Once you get over the shock of hearing Joyce sing entirely in English, there are any number of subtle pleasures here, including a haunting, harmonised take on Nat King Cole's ‘Nature Boy’, and – for diehards – an archetypally Joycean, scat-happy original lovingly entitled ‘Mingus, Miles and Coltrane’.