Ran Blake & Dominique Eade - Roots and Byways

Roots & Byways is a model 21st-century recital of 20th-century song, a well-rounded program of jazz, folk, soul, stage, movie, and TV tunes rife with interconnections. There are five or six jazz art songs (counting Mancini's "Dreamsville"), four in a row at the top. Max Roach's "Mendacity" has a dead earnest political lyric, contrasted with the Gershwins' satirical "Who Cares" (sung, in 1931 musical Of Thee I Sing, by a self-absorbed US President). Two tunes from the French include Michel Legrand's Umbrellas of Cherbourg ballad "Watch What Happens," the closer here whose melody alludes to the opener "Mood Indigo." There's one R&B obscurity-"I Remember," a deep track from the 1973 sophomore album by Memphis family band the Sylvers-and a stone soul classic which spawned few jazz versions, Whitney Houston's "Saving All My Love for You," where Dominique Eade catches the central contradiction between the melody's soaring confidence and the lyric's wallow in self-abnegation. American lyrics often get weird or grim of course. That one's followed by the tale of another troubled soul who's fallen far, the Hank Williams chestnut "Lost Highway." And then there's "On Top of Old Smokey," homey oldie kids are taught to sing. It's cheery finish: "You'll be forsaken/And never know why."