Jane Irving - Don't Quit Now

(Jane Irving, 2023)

Jane Irving

Art often emerges from or is changed by stress. Within the performing community, the COVID-19 pandemic produced a stressor of static friction: the desire to perform and make a living when the opportunity is taken away. What the pandemic offered the creative community was the time and impetus to anticipate daily life and professional changes that were not likely to go away anytime soon.

Australian by birth, New Yorker by inclination, vocalist Jane Irving spent her 15-month imposed "sabbatical" contemplating the future of live performance could look like on the other side of the pandemic. She used the time to reconsider her repertoire, focusing on retooling her book while seeking creative sustenance in space provided by the pandemic and the vulnerability realized from it. The idle time allowed Irving to consider the project that would become "Don't Quit Now," populating it with selections chosen with nuanced reflection.

The album title truncates that of the opening song, the Jimmy Rowles/Johnny Mercer "Baby, Don't You Quit Now" originally recorded by Tony Bennett in 1969, appearing on I've Gotta Be Me (Columbia). Irving turns the song into a call for action, a raging summons of patience and endurance to hold out. Irving is framed with the simplicity of her piano trio (pianist Josh Richman, bassist Kevin Hailey, and drummer Kayvon Gordon) playing head arrangements, allowing her seasoned alto to take center stage. Irving takes full advantage of the talent and space provided on Jay Leonhart's rarely heard "Let The Flower Grow," turning the ballad into a plea to both slow down and change direction.

On the lone jazz "standard," "Night In Tunisia," Irving turns the jazz warhorse on its head with her lyrics and a whiplash vocalese/scat command. Her performance is thrilling as is Richman's untethered solo as it accelerates to a coda propelled by Gordon's crack trapset, all kept between the ditches by Hailey's sure time. "Someone's Been Sending Me Flowers" is vintage Blossom Dearie deftly updated, featuring Irving on piano, as she is on the Dave Frishberg composition "Snowbound," where she creates a warm sonic interior, heated by Hailey's capable bass solo. Irving closes her recital driving Rodgers' and Hart's "Lover" right down the middle of mainstream jazz, reminding us that there remains ample room for this music.