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Courtney Cutchins — Grunge to Grace
(Laseryn Music no#, 2024, CD / DL)

by Jon Davis, Published 2024-10-23

Grunge to Grace Cover art

When I think of jazz vocals, I picture a dapper man in a tux or a woman in a cocktail dress taking a stage in a dim club to croon predictable renditions of chestnuts from the American Songbook. While it’s certainly true that all of my favorite jazz artists are instrumentalists, I will concede that there have been vocalists worthy of note in the history of the genre. I would never say that Ella Fitzgerald was anything other than a jazz great, even if she’s not in my personal top ten list. Sure she made some sappy pop recordings, but that doesn’t detract from the quality of her life’s work. Many singers have ventured beyond the standards, interpreting Beatles songs and the like, but one thing that I don’t often associate with jazz singers is writing their own songs. All of which leads me to this album by Courtney Cutchins. In 2015, while she was experiencing difficult times, she engaged in a therapy technique that involved revisiting the music that gave her joy as a child. She had vivid memories of Soundgarden’s “Black Hole Sun,” and that song became a beacon for her to explore how to bring together the Seattle rock of her youth with her budding career as a jazz singer. On Gunge to Grace, she interprets two songs written by Soundgarden’s Chris Cornell, “Boot Camp” and “The Day I Tried to Live,” and Kurt Cobain’s “All Apologies.” These three are combined with six of her own songs, all done in a style that is clearly jazz, but also clearly not traditionalist. She’s backed by a capable band consisting of Matt Clohesy on bass, Obed Calvaire on drums, David Cook on keyboards, and guitarists Max Bernstein and Nir Felder. Both in her cover songs and her originals, she seeks to find beauty in unexpected places, including in the midst of suffering. The music reflects this brilliantly, with lyrics that are often built on sadness and pain delivered in a silky tone rife with emotion. Within the general idiom of jazz vocals, she manages to convey real emotion, never just doing runs for their own sake, and modulating her tone with breath and grit to offset the smoothness — in addition to jazz singers, she cites Jeff Buckley as an influence. The backing arrangements also do a great job of incorporating the kind of bold harmonic moves of grunge rock into a jazz context. And they do this without actually venturing into rock. I was highly skeptical of Grunge to Grace when it showed up, but Courtney Cutchins’ artistry and imagination won me over.

Filed under: New releases, 2024 releases

Related artist(s): Courtney Cutchins

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