February 2004
Blue Joy. Bonnie J. Jensen (La Brava) 8 stars:
The Sydney-based singer is hardly advanced in years but has passport
pages full of foreign gigs to her credit. It was timely, a couple
of years back, when her debut album was released - a calling card
to announce her presence and show off the wares. Among the impressive
run through of jazz standards were a sprinkling of her own compositions
which pointed to a seam of talent that should be developed further.
Her second album is that leap - a confident, bold and coherent
statement of a musician (singer, player, composer and arranger)
hitting stride. Jensen is that rarest of things in Australian
singers - a full blooded, grown up sexy woman unafraid to let
her passions and eroticism inform her music in a sophisticated
way, beyond the usual raunchy, bluesy stuff. She's a nightclub
singer who belongs in gowns, not jeans, and harkens back to a
school and a style that is both timeless and increasingly rare.
Performing with her on a selection of her own tunes and such wonders
as "This Masquerade", "Every Breath You Take" and "Just The Two
of Us" are a crack line-up of jazz musicians that frame this music
in just the lustrous and vivid colours it needs. It's a very even
album, with no missteps, beginning with Bonnie's own "Tokyo Skies",
a remarkably frank and modern exposition of desire and neediness,
plumbing a well of lonelines in "Sharing The Night With The Blues",
"Good Morning Heartache" and "Baby Come Home" - canny choices
all of them - and topped with a radical reworking of Stevie Wonder's
"Creepin" (hear the jukebox), replete with Jensen's own rap fantasia
at the close. Her reharmonisation of Sting's classic is beautiful
and logical, finding new layers in a tune that always hinted they
were there. The album is out in late February.
