DEB BOWMAN, Reflection

First acquainted with the pure intimate voice and exquisite storytelling skills of veteran jazz, musical theatre and cabaret performer Deb Bowman via her 2019 album Fast Heart, I was both touched and mesmerized by the way she paid tribute to her late sister Patti in part via thematically chosen “butterfly songs” by Herbie Hancock and Thelonious Monk.

When she began conceptualizing her fourth, gorgeously arranged, stylistically eclectic and often rhythmically exotic fourth album Reflection, her goal was to honor key selections from the songbooks of three recently departed legends – Michel Legrand, Burt Bacharach and Stephen Sondheim. A delay in the production process led to a fortuitous expansion that includes colorful twists on six other 20th Century gems.

Working seamlessly with her clever and insightful pianist, arranger and musical director Dean Fransen, Bowman creates lush sonic dreamscapes that serve as alternately intimate and sweeping backdrops to the grand phrasing she brings to some of the craftiest and most romantic lyrics of all time. To start with, Bowman indeed includes loving, stylish odes to Bacharach (a plucky, gospel tinged “This Girl’s in Love With You,” inspired by Aretha Franklin’s timeless version), Legrand (a whimsical, Latin tinged stroll through “How Do You Keep the Music Playing?”) and Sondheim (a sassy, slightly dramatic, also Latinized breeze through the usually staid “Send in the Clowns”).

Those are the dazzling springboards for a set that includes wordless operatic vocals between verses of “Moon River,” a mystical thunderstorm and haunting spoken word intro to “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” and a charming, jazzed up swirl through “Somewhere That’s Green” (from Little Shop of Horrors). Bowman’s delightfully peripatetic nine-song journey includes sojourns to the Rodgers & Hart songbook (the starkly eloquent heartbreaker “He Was Too Good to Me”), the bold, romantic drama of Meredith Wilson’s “Till There Was You” and the gently lyrical piano-vocal closer “Baby Mine” (an early Disney favorite from Dumbo).