Ms. Souza’s records for Universal are sumptuously produced. They also have their artistic moments. Ms. Souza and Mr. Klein turn Ms. Mitchell’s “Down to You,” the cardinal L.A. singer’s unwieldy meditation on loneliness and alienation, into chilling lounge material.
Ms. Souza is less successful with Sting’s “When We Dance” on the same album. Only a narcissist like Sting could sing a self-congratulatory lyric like “When we dance, angels will run and hide their wings” and make it halfway believable. Ms. Souza can’t pull off the same con.
She is also admittedly holding something back on the tunes she wrote with her husband for Tide, about her misspent youth, her nomadic existence and her feelings of love.
“Larry is very keen when he listens to a song to see if there is a story there, and if so, how does it get to you? How does it affect you?” Ms. Souza said. “I’m not trying to confess everything about myself.”
That’s the trouble with her foray into pop. Nobody in the jazz world can touch Ms. Souza. But pop is different from jazz.
If the class of singers against whom she now competes for listeners could never sing the music of Maria Schneider, the Grammy Award-winning Big Band composer who crafted lyrical horn-like vocal parts crafted for Ms. Souza, it’s because they don’t have to: it’s because they don’t have to: They write their own songs based on their own personal narratives.
Yes, Ms. Mitchell has a lovely voice. She also can turn a phrase. But in the end, it’s her honesty, Ms. Mitchell herself as a character in the music, that stays with us. Ultimately, the most effective song on Tide is Ms. Souza’s wordless rendition of Paul Simon’s “Amulet.” It’s closest to her signature jazz work: Sometimes for this vocalist, the words get in the way.
At times, Ms. Souza sounds like she misses New York, even if the weather in L.A. the day we spoke was “great, as always!”
She’s not sure when she will perform again with her colleagues like Ms. Schneider, with whom she made such beautiful music.
“It’s hard,” Ms. Souza said. “Her music is so difficult and I’m so far away now. We lived three blocks from one another on the Upper West Side. We are dear, dear friends. She came over all the time. I went over there. We’ll have to see.”
She is not the only one of her New York set to have dispersed. In the meantime, Mr. Simon has moved to Florida and Mr. Klein to Barcelona. New York, after all, can be a cold place in more ways than one.
“I’m out here now,” Ms. Souza said resolutely. “But I go to the beach every day.”
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