Lauren Kinhan ....

The first thing you notice is her voice, and then her savvy choices. Lauren Kinhan possesses a rare and beautiful instrument, tough and tender, clear and fine-grained in every register, whether she’s dipping down into husky chest tones or ascending into silvery head tones. With her glorious sound, she could sing anything and make it a memorable listening experience, but Kinhan is defining herself as an artist by creating her own material, making a compelling case that 21st century jazz singers can thrive outside the context of the American Songbook. Rooted in jazz’s improvisational imperative, she knows that you best celebrate the music by remaking it in your own image. “Think of me as a horn player who sings a lyric or a dancer filling a phrase, a reedy voice that’s lived in, adventurous and unapologetic,” Kinhan says. “It all circles around living in the moment, telling a story and letting conventions be undressed and re-outfitted.”

Circle in a Square is Kinhan’s third release under her own name, but she’s already established a vivid identity as a songwriter with a gift for capturing the emotional currents of everyday life. She made a powerful first impression with 2000’s Hardly Blinking, an eclectic program of original songs exploring an array of topics and instrumental textures. A decade later, she followed up with the highly personal Avalon, an album deeply informed by her experience of motherhood, and the pleasures and challenges of family life. In many ways Circle In a Square picks up where Avalon left off, evoking the numinous possibilities in a flirty pair of shoes, a familiar melody, or an insinuating groove.

Part of what makes Circle in a Square so revelatory is that it provides a rare 360-degree glimpse into Kinhan’s musical world. She wrote all the lyrics and almost all the music for every piece, and shaped each arrangement working with her core rhythm section of pianist/keyboardist Andy Ezrin and drummer Ben Wittman (the well-traveled Will Lee and David Finck divide bass duties). The steady personnel provides a cohesive feel throughout the album, while an all-star gallery of special guests contributes instrumental commentary and eloquent solos, such as Brazilian guitar great Romero Lubambo’s perfectly sculpted acoustic passage on the intricate, lyric-less “Chasing the Sun” and trumpet maestro Randy Brecker’s melodically charged passage on the title track.

Let’s talk about that title track, which opens the album. “It’s a bird/It’s a plane” Kinhan sings, but instead of a Superman sighting she’s hailing music itself. Sounding like a cross between Donald Fagen and Joni Mitchell, the song captures the evocative power of a record spinning on a turntable with a finely etched lyric married to a seductive melody that embodies the very transportive power Kinhan describes. It’s a bravura performance, and everything that follows lives up to its implicit promise. She often makes brilliant use of contrasting musical elements, like the way the jagged piano figure sets off the long sinuous melody of “My Painted Lady Butterfly” (a song tied together by Joel Frahm’s serpentine soprano sax solo). She summons the intensity of a gospel singer on the deceptively languorous “Another Hill to Climb,” which initially sounds like an uplifting anthem but instead unfolds as a cautionary tale. Whether rapturously becalmed (“The Deep Within”), on the good-time prowl (“Pocketful of Harlem”), or tormented by the search for unknowable answers (“To Live or Die”), Kinhan turns each piece into a self-contained emotional narrative driven by her unerring musical taste.

There’s no denying the scope and power of Kinhan’s individual vision. With Circle in a Square she fully reveals herself as an inspired singer and songwriter whose voice gains depth with every listen.

Andrew Gilbert is a music writer in Berkeley, Calif. who writes for the San Francisco Chronicle, San Jose Mercury News, JazzTimes and other publications.
Read more: http://laurenkinhan.com/music/circle-in-a-square/