**** Ran Blake

MERENGUE: DOMINICAN MUSIC AND DOMINICAN IDENTITY

(Soul Note)

The immense range of musical techniques Sarah Vaughan brought to song could have easily been intimidating to any jazz artist executing an album-length tribute to the vocalist. But pianist Ran Blake addresses her art with an audacious bravado, probably helped by the fact that he's using a piano rather than his voice.

There were two sides to Vaughan's personality: the sassy and sentimental pop star and the sophisticated and cool jazz singer. Blake takes the dare of making an adventuresome solo jazz piano session by mining the pop-oriented Vaughan. "Tenderly" is offered in four abstract versions, with various Bartókian and Monkian shadings evoking tragic love. A nearly gothic "The Girl from Ipanema" reveals a world removed from Getz-like romanticism; even drek like "Whatever Lola Wants" gets deconstructed into a postmodern threnody about fractured desires. Numerous melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic displacements foreground Blake's astringent intellectualism, but this is a brainy set of improvisations offering a full-hearted appreciation of Vaughan's emotionally rich singing.

-- Norman Weinstein