Dida Pelled - I Wish You Would
(La Reserve Records, 2026)
Breaking hearts you are ruling, little Coquette
True hearts tenderly dreaming of you—Gus Kahn, “Coquette” (1928)
What the Brooklyn-based guitarist, singer, and songwriter Dida Pelled has is an abundance of confidence that never brags because it, and she, don’t have to. A native of Tel Aviv, Pelled showed up, fully realized, in New York City at The New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music in 2008. Trumpeter Fabio Morgera saw Pelled performing in New York, offering her the opportunity to make her first recording with Italy’s Red Records (for whom Morgera was recording at the time).
Pelled’s meeting with Morgera resulted in her debut recording Dida Plays and Sings (Red Records, 2011) with Morgera and the late Roy Hargrove contributing trumpet spots. The singer next released Modern Love Songs (Self Released, 2015) with its popular single “Jack Nice,” followed by her second and final Red Records release, A Missing Shade of Blue (2016). The singer took a hard left in 2022 with her Love of the Tiger (Self Released), a far-reaching work that dramatically reframes love songs in both strange and fantastic ways. While not exactly jazz, the recording is beautifully musical and contemporary, all original compositions that amply reveal Pelled’s keen sense of humor and observation.
The artist’s promotional material states that Pelled, “…has a knack for finding and playing songs that feel like secrets worth sharing…” and that is exactly what she does. The singer explores her love of the blues on I Wish You Would, dialing up the pure sensuousness, wit, and astute observations to eleven. Make no mistake, this is a beautifully sexy recording, set off by Pelled’s complex, coquettish delivery.
Featuring an exceptional jazz piano trio comprising pianist Sullivan Fortner, bassist Tony Scherr, and drummer Kenny Wollesen, the album is a blues recording, but one with that huge dollop of jazz that would make a listener wonder which came first, the blues, jazz, or did the two arise symbiotically. No matter, though, Pelled commands these blues standards with her confident and informed way.
Pelled began rolling out this recording with the John Lee Hooker chestnut, “Dimples,” and the blues standard, “Hesitation Blues.” While these songs have jazz in the basement, it is the blues live upstairs in the house. The singer is organically flirtatious and coy, singing with a perfectly coiffed delivery of honey and morphine. Pelled’s “Dimples” is playfully dissolute and “Hesitation Blues,” demurely decadent. Pelled practices an alchemy that makes these songs wholesomely sexy. “Hesitation Blues” has no acknowledged composer, handed down in the Delta's blues tradition of each performer injecting their own lyrics. Pelled does this with true style, witness:
“She says, ‘Touch by bonnet, touch my shawl, but do not touch my waterfall"‘…”
Right when one would expect Pelled to sing “jelly roll.” But she is not this base. Too clever by half, Pelled folds innuendos three deep and still keeps the pot simmering. The title song is a 1955 composition by Billy Boy Arnold. The singer presents the song as a toned-down Howlin’ Wolf rumba, softened by Fortner’s use of an electric piano, which the pianist also employs on the wonderfully languid “I’m Sittin’ On Top of the World” that may be the most “down home” of the blues on the record. She does the same with the Frank Sinatra vehicle, “Blues in the Night,” giving it some blues bona fides.
Dida Pelled treats us to a masterclass on how one transforms the old, making it not only new but transcendent and freshly definitive.
