Singers who have achieved commercial success with CDs normally filed in the 'smooth jazz' racks are generally reluctant to deviate much from a winning formula. Madeleine Peyroux therefore deserves praise for taking some chances with her latest release, Standing on the Rooftop, on Decca.
The most audacious of these was to replace Larry Klein - a producer with the Midas touch who has recently overseen hit albums for Melody Gardot, Herbie Hancock, Walter Becker and wife Luciana Souza, among others, as well as Peyroux's last three - with Craig Street. Between them, Peyroux and Street, who has also worked with Norah Jones, stripped down the instrumentation, and brought in players with uncompromisingly individualistic styles.
These include guitarist Marc Ribot, who is called in by artists such as Elvis Costello and Tom Waits to add an element of edginess to an arrangement, bassist Meshell Ndegocello, and pianist and arranger Allen Toussaint.
Much of the album is self composed, with collaborators ranging from Jerry Scheinman, who also plays violin on the sessions, to former Rolling Stones bassist Bill Wyman, who does not play but has co-written two of the standout tracks: The Kind You Can't Afford and Leaving Home Again.
'I have been building on the relationships I developed in co-writing, and something new has taken hold of me,' Peyroux comments. 'This project is meant to be a wider dreamscape than previous recordings. I'm interested in exploring tougher sounds, even ugly sounds - trying to find something more raw than the voice that I have now, and in the accompaniment that I have become used to.'
The cover tunes are an interesting mixed bag. Robert Johnson's blues song Love in Vain - covered superbly by the Rolling Stones - gets a radically modern makeover, while Paul McCartney's White Album love song to his old English sheepdog, Martha My Dear, is reinterpreted with banjo accompaniment.
'I'd grown up listening to Robert Johnson songs and I thought it was tricky to cover,' Peyroux says. 'We did all kinds of renditions; we wanted to bring out the perspective.' Bob Dylan's I Threw It All Away gets a rootsy treatment which recalls some of Street's production work for Jones, but without the blandness.
