Sarah Moule, Stormy Emotions by Stephen Graham

As literary a jazz album as any around this year words matter and singer Sarah Moule knows this better than most. With her husband pianist Simon Wallace who worked and wrote with the ”poet laureate of lovers and losers” Fran Landesman (1927-2011) extensively over many years Stormy Emotions is a homage to Fran. And while recorded in a studio is very much a jazz club record in spirit and prefers considered cynicism to fake sincerity as a first choice. So that means it is about intimacy, people, experience, and you actually do not feel that you have been sold a bottle of 1950s air neatly stoppered and tied up with a bow. Stormy Emotions is not about distance, a substance that we have used and abused for too long. Brought forward for release to this month from the proposed plan of May god only knows that’s a good thing. Maybe it will be a guardian angel to hover over the return of the Soho clubs. The singer’s work in the past has appeared on the Linn label and on Sarah and Simon’s own imprint Red Ram. But this is even better than her best album to date Songs from the Floating World released in 2014. Sarah’s voice has an integrity to it and seems to scoop up the past into a wise version of the present. Influenced at the beginning of her career by Jeri Southern and Billie Holiday and mentored by Claire Martin, musicians joining Moule and Wallace are double bassists Mick Hutton, ”Level” Neville Malcolm, drummers Paul Robinson and Rod Youngs, guitarists Charlie Cawood and Nigel Price plus former Polar Bear saxophonist Mark Lockheart also figure. Lockheart provides an instrumental highlight of the whole caboodle with his soprano saxophone introduction on ‘Are We Just Having Fun’. Like Jackie and Roy Sarah and Simon are two as one and conjure a novella in the space of a song. ‘Magician’s Confession’ is best of all. SG. On 33. To be released on 19 March