*** Mary LaRose

WALKING WOMAN

(GM)

LaRose and her husband, the arranger and saxophonist Jim Lederer, have come up with a vocal album that encompasses tradition (the Bessie Smith/Fletcher Henderson "Trombone Butter") while pushing the music's boundaries (a jazz treatment of Purcell's "Dido's Lament"). The instrumentation and arrangements are part of what hold this wide-ranging experiment together: Lederer sets LaRose's clear contralto against plush earth tones of reeds, trombones, and Hammond B-3 organ. On a tune like Led Zep's "Kashmir" (the "I've Got Rhythm" of post-rock) he uses the organ as much for barking rhythms as aquamarine sustains. LaRose claims Eddie Jefferson's vocalese as an inspiration -- writing lyrics (or wordless vocal lines) to jazz compositions and solos. She covers Jefferson's version of Johnny Griffin's "Soft and Furry," but she also digs into the high speed and hairpin turns of one of Anthony Braxton's diagram-titled tunes and fills out the images of Eric Dolphy's Monk tribute "Hat and Beard." Not everything appeals -- the wordless, expressionist interpretation of Mingus's "Pithecanthropus Erectus" (replete with monkey sounds) grates more than it has to, and there's just plain too much "jazz" in Lennon & McCartney's "Blackbird." But these are minor flaws in an integrated whole, where voice, words, ensemble detail, and imaginative soloing carry equal weight in telling the story.

-- Jon Garelick