“…mood music in a jugular vein.”
Spooky Jazz Vols. 1 & 2 were so well received that Hannah Gill saw no reason to stop there. Eschewing the typical holiday canon of Christmas fare, Gill opted for the autumnal climes of the Halloween season. Gill’s ability to find appropriate spooky music while appropriating music not otherwise associated with the holiday is uncanny and productive. Whether this and/or Gill’s impressive cleverness can help her extend this successful subgenre run remains to be seen. But for the time being, there is much to celebrate in Gill’s third installment of the series, named…wait for it…Spooky Jazz Vol. 3.
Hannah Gill came by it all honestly. With a wicked love for Broadway musicals, particularly Cabaret, swing and big band music derived from her experiences in New York City, where she moved after high school. She has performed locally with the neo-swing Glenn Crytzer Orchestra, toured internationally with her own jazz band, Gordon Webster and Friends, and spent three years on the road with Scott Bradlee’s Postmodern Jukebox. Gill made her debut on Turtle Bay Records with Everybody Loves a Lover (2023).
Gill’s ensemble for Vol. 3 looks a lot like her support on Vol. 2, including violinist Gabe Terracciano, reedman Ricky Alexander, pianist Gordon Webster, guitarist Justin Poindexter, bassist Philip Ambuel, and drummer Ben Zweig). Trumpeter Danny Jonokuchi and accordionist Sasha Papernik add their own magic to the cagy collection of eleven hidden gems. The sonics and performance continue to be digitally vintage with enough moxie to pour on the camp, but not too much.
Gill fashions her third Halloween release as a sleek and sinister stage show. She introduces the festivities with a narrated bit of crafty camp, deftly lifted from Alfred Hitchcock Presents: Music to Be Murdered By before sliding her way into The Dooley Sisters’ 1958 doo-wop recording “Spider in the Web,” which the singer translates into a deceptive ‘20s vamp with notes of western and gypsy swing, all belted out with a pig foot and a bottle of beer.
The beauty of this recital is that the best-known song is “Old Devil Moon,” with the remaining ten being just obscure enough to be interesting. The standard's introduction uses a percussive polyrhythm to instill a beautiful, meandering time orgy. Gill derives her inspiration from the Anita O’Day performance with the Oscar Peterson quartet from Anita Sings The Most (Verve, 1957). Dinah Washington’s 1949 “The Richest Guy in the Graveyard” is 100 percent Grade A camp dispensed in all the proper proportions (where is that pigfoot?). Ricky Alexander gives a boozy saxophone solo followed by Gordon Webster’s superb pianism. This is Gill’s formula.
Gill and company present Artie Shaw’s “Moon Ray” as an evening stroll on an unusually warm fall evening. “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” sports a light tango flavor until Gill turns it into a steamy seasonal classic. The singer provides her own “Wolves in the Treeline” as a seductive 12-bar blues, pulling the necktie of her beau to get him closer. What will next year bring?