Jude Johnstone "Blue Light" (Bojak Records 2007)

Stylish jazz with a lot of soul

Jude Johnstone emerges from the excellent Blue Light as something of an enigma. The riddle is not so much the album itself, which is the kind of wonderfully sensual and sophisticated jazz that faded a little when that crass upstart rock n roll kicked at the door and shouted Be-Bop-A-Lula through the letterbox.

The puzzle arises more from the fact that Blue Light is such a stylised album, it’s difficult to imagine Bonnie Raitt, Stevie Nicks, Trisha Year wood and Jennifer Warnes covering her songs with any degree of comfort. Neither is it an easy to leap to imagine this nightclub chanteuse dovetailing with Jackson Browne, Raitt, Rodney Crowell and Julie Miller on a previous release, On A Good Day. However if Blue Light achieves one thing only it will be to make the discerning listener go and find out how those collaborations worked out. The appetite for Jude Johnstone and her songs is well and truly whetted.

But thankfully it does achieve a whole lot more than act as a springboard for research, Jude Johnstone is the kind of naturally gifted singer who has no need to search for the soul of a song, she unerringly finds it within herself.

She also appears to meander through the likes of New York Morning as if she were greeting old and welcome friends. Throughout Blue Light she makes time and space for all the tracks, none is dispatched with undue haste leaving any unfinished business. She is helped in this process by arrangements that are as light and fluid as Johnstone’s voice.

Put simply this an album of classic jazz and soul, beautifully and carefully presented. It’s not often that music can engender such a sense of well-being, so enjoy it when it does.

Date review added:  Saturday, October 27, 2007
Reviewer:  Michael Mee
Reviewers Rating:
Related web link:  Bojak Records