Let’s get this straight from the get go: Jane Monheit has one of the most astonishing voices in music. Period. Resonant and clear as a brook in her upper register, and warm as mulled wine when she goes downtown, one gets the feeling that Monheit could do absolutely anything she wanted to with her voice. There’s a line from the movie Bull Durham where Kevin Costner tells the wild young Tim Robbins, “When you were a baby the gods reached down and turned your left arm into a thunderbolt.” One could say the same about Monheit’s voice. The question has never been whether she could sing, but what she was going to do about it.

In Monheit’s latest album, Surrender, she has done an awful lot.

The album resonates with musical perfection . . . so much so, that about the only criticism one might fairly level at it is that of being too, well, perfect. But we’ll get back to that.

Surrender serves up a gorgeous smorgasbord, ranging from the sultry title cut; to the breezy, swinging Brazilian Só Tinha de Ser Com Vocé, to a jazzy cover of Stevie Wonder’s Overjoyed, to full-blown orchestrations on numbers like Moon River and So Many Stars. Monheit has an excellent sense of how to adapt her voice to each number, at times savoring the words like chocolate, at times tossing them off like a scarf on the bed.

She has said that for sometime she and her band have been leaning steadily towards Brazilian music (see accompanying interview). That inclination flavors much of the album, finding pure release on three of the tracks: Só Tinha, Rio de Maio (a duet with Ivan Lins), and Caminhos Cruzados (with Toots Thielemans on harp, and which purportedly was laid down in a single take). With the lyrics in Portuguese, Monheit might be singing the phone book for all I know. But who cares? Ignorance is bliss. These cuts, for me, are the hands-down favorites of the album, with Só Tinha standing well out in front, with its stripped-down musicality, groovy rhythm and wickedly playful syncopation. This is maybe the clearest evidence yet that Monheit is not just a “pop singer with jazz sensibility” (see interview), but fully capable of singing as if she were jazz incarnate when she wants.

The album was produced by Jorge Calandrelli, who has also produced albums for Barbara Streisand and Celine Dion, among many others. His production provides a lush, multi-layered musicality to the album, including full string orchestration for Henri Mancini’s Moon River. The result is impeccable, and yet . . . . At times one wishes the sound just wasn’t so big. Don’t get me wrong: Moon River is a lovely cut, and for any fans of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, I dare you not to feel a heart tug when Monheit’s voice catches at “my huckleberry friend.” (That catch in the voice may not be calculated, either. This is a special song for Jane, which she talks about in the interview.) Nonetheless, if you’ve had the chance to see Monheit live (see accompanying concert review), you know how much more powerful she can be in an unadorned duet with pianist Michael Kanan. She simply doesn’t need any bells and whistles to sing her heart out.

Much the same might be said of the Sergio Mendes-produced track So Many Stars. The song has an easy, rolling rhythm that rocks you like a lullaby in a hammock, and Mendes himself accompanies on piano, punctuating the vocals nicely and providing a strikingly elegant interlude that is just too short. Monheit, who normally likes to be very involved in the production of her music, left this track completely in the hands of the master. When she came in, everything was set, and all she had to do was sing. “I’ve done that sort of thing for other people’s albums,” she told me on the phone, “but never for my own. But when it’s Sergio, you know, you put your trust in him. I mean, the man is a legend. . . . I was surprised, actually, to get there and find a finished track. But it was lovely, it came out great.” Yes, it did. Still, one can’t help wondering what the sound would have been like with just the two of them, minus the strings, percussion, and all that jazz.

Two other particularly notable cuts on the album are Overjoyed, which Monheit says is her personal favorite (she’s a big Stevie Wonder fan), and the title track, which was written by her one and only vocal coach, Peter Eldridge. The former, laced with the bossa rhythms that flavor the album as a whole, builds with a quiet intensity that is, well, joyful. The latter is a seductive ¾ imperative to "Never mind the dishes piled high in the sink . . . / Go on and lose yourself for just a little while.” Here, Monheit seems to revel in pulling out her full bag of vocal tricks. The song also features an all-too-brief guitar solo by Michael Okazaki.

The principle musicians on the album—including Michael Kanan on keys, Miles Okazaki on guitar, Ari Ambrose on sax, Orlando Le Fleming on acoustic bass, and husband Rick Montalbano on drums—all turn in such excellent performances they leave one wishing to hear more solo interludes.

In the final evaluation, I was nearly tempted to knock one star off for a musical perfection that seems at odds with the spirit of jazz that I like best. But then that would have been just plain mean. This was precisely the sound Monheit was trying to achieve: “I wanted a much more complex sounding, a much richer sounding record,” she told me, “with more layers and levels and colors.” She’s got it, and it’s hard to imagine this kind of lush sound being executed any better than it is here.

SEE THE JANE MONHEIT INTERVIEW

SEE THE JANE MONHEIT CONCERT REVIEW