“Everything she sings seems to rise from a smile… transparent purity” – Downbeat
Few American jazz singers have had as long and fruitful a relationship with Brazilian music as Karrin Allyson. Her early albums included such classics as “Corcovado” and “One Note Samba”. Then, her 1999 recording From Paris to Rio split the difference between songs from those musical cities. 2008’s Imagina: Songs of Brazil raised the ante on Rio. Now, here’s another all-Brazilian outing, 2024’s A Kiss for Brazil, featuring the great Bahian singer-guitarist Rosa Passos on two songs.
What’s remarkable about Allyson’s ongoing foray into these sounds is she has never recorded the same song twice. The song list for A Kiss for Brazil includes Luiz Bonfá’s “Manhã de Carnaval” and Antonio Carlos Jobim’s “Wave”. However, you may wonder why it has taken her so long to get to those oft-performed gems. The answer, for starters, is that there’s a bottomless pool of great Brazilian songs to record. Also, Allyson has engaged in many other pursuits as one of jazz’s most popular and wide-ranging vocalists.
Nominated for five Grammys, she has explored bop and blues, pop and Great American standards, and written her own songs. Her highly regarded 2001 album Ballads: Remembering John Coltrane beautifully rendered the songs on Trane’s 1963 classic. Her 2004 album, Wild for You, is a collection of singer-songwriter pop tunes— “my first love”. Here, Allyson performs songs by Joni Mitchell, Cat Stevens, Carole King, and Carly Simon. On 2015’s Many a New Day, she paid tribute to Rodgers and Hammerstein alongsode pianist Kenny Barron.
More recently, she starred in the ambitious 2019 concept recording, Shoulder to Shoulder: Centennial Tribute to Women’s Suffrage. This was a collection of Suffragist Era songs (plus two of hers).
Recommended for fans of Jane Monheit, Stacey Kent, Madeleine Peyroux and Diana Krall.
