Breath From Another

By David E. Thigpen

These days some of the best jazz singing is turning up in the pop-record racks. Nineteen-year-old Esthero, singer of a Toronto trip-hop duo that bears her name, is the newest member of the school of so-called blue-groove vocalists (it includes Skye Edwards of Morcheeba and Tracey Thorn of Everything but the Girl), who use the delivery and seductive lilt of jazz to bring warmth to chilly avant-garde pop. Esthero's debut with her co-writer and producer, Doc (Martin McKinney), weaves hip-hop, drum and bass, funk and ska into tunes full of emotional intensity. Doc controls this array as a pointillist might, coloring each song with an unusual palette of detail--the strum of a harp here, the sigh of a trumpet there--and arranges it all into a seamless backdrop. In this setting Esthero's sweet, bluesy voice shines like a young Billie Holiday's.

--By David E. Thigpen