THE VOICE, OVER a poor telephone line from Cleveland, Ohio, sounds faint, but it's still unmistakably Vanessa Rubin. This is a singer for whom the word 'sassy' could easily have been coined, and the relaxed but assured quality of those sinuous vocals comes across just as strongly when she talks.
Girl Talk, as it happens, was the title of her last album, and a recording that made a lot of critics sit up and take notice. This was a reversal. Although Rubin has consistently had her share of good notices over the years - particularly for her live performances - her recorded work has often provoked grumbles that it had been too much of a mixed bag. The material she recorded early on in her career ranged from the standard repertoire to soul-pop tunes aimed at a broad audience, and some albums came dangerously close to getting her pigeonholed as 'smooth jazz'. In fact she belongs, and always has, in the company of singers of real substance such as Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan and Dinah Washington.
Girl Talk, on the Telarc label, came much closer to doing her justice. A stellar cast of musicians was involved, including pianists Larry Wallis and Cedar Walton, trombonist Steve Davis and tenor saxophonists Eric Alexander and Javon Jackson. She also got to duet with the great Etta Jones on But Not For Me and Gee Baby, Ain't I Good For You, and it proved a balanced, effective pairing.
Rubin also explored some of her Caribbean heritage - she was born in Cleveland but to parents of Trinidadian and Louisianan descent - with an endearingly naughty calypso, Sex Is A Misdemeanor (The More You Miss De Meaner You Get).
We can probably expect to hear a few tunes from Girl Talk when she plays City Hall Concert Hall next week, but Rubin has already moved on, both as an artist and from her record company.
'It's the most recent album that I've done, but I'm working on another now that I will probably release independently. I think most record companies now are willing to put a lot of time and money into certain artists, because they are able to build them, but not so much into others. I have a couple of projects, which I want to keep under wraps for the moment, that I've wanted to do for myself for some time, so this is the best way to move forward,' she explains.
Even if her record companies haven't always had that great an idea of her career's direction, Rubin herself always has. Music was part of her life from early childhood, and her eclectic taste in it was shaped by the sheer variety of what her parents and eight siblings listened to. She grew up loving soul and Motown, but also jazz, calypso and later reggae. She managed her first quartet as well as fronting it, and by the time she moved to New York more than 20 years ago she had already established a strong local following. Pulling up her roots and relocating to the Big Apple was a considerable risk, but Rubin was not going to miss her opportunity to take a bite of it. 'I have been based in New York since 1982. It's the best place to be for what I do, and of course it's a great city,' she says.
