Silje Nergaard, the Norwegian singer, had Pat Metheny on her side during the 1990s, which gave her career a useful boost. She still has some affinities with the open-handed and gracefully lyrical notion of jazz that Metheny espouses. But Nergaard is no clone of her influential supporter; she has steadily been accumulating plenty of musical credit of her own. Nine of the 12 tracks on her latest album are originals, and Nergaard's seven albums have made her something of a star in her homeland.
At Ronnie Scott's the singer has an impressive group of supporting musicians - also improvisers of character who get plenty of space to themselves. She avoids falling back on the straight-jazz singer's usual safe bets (scat-singing, blues inflections or much reference to standard songs), choosing instead to work over relaxed funk or minimalist slow-burn settings for ballads. She has a flexible and highly developed technique, with instrument-like qualities in her dynamic and tonal range. She is also more contemporary in her references than such comparably small-voiced female jazz vocal stars as Diana Krall and Stacey Kent. At times during this gig, Nergaard was more reminiscent of idiomatically experimental singers like the UK's Norma Winstone - though she rarely lets go of a groove.
Nergaard's palette of sounds veers from a nasal, oboe-like upper range to a cooler, more dispassionate version of a soul-singer's whooping and note-warping on single words. The textures, meanwhile, can shift from humane mellowness to a startling voice-synth tone, as if Nergaard had suddenly been abducted and a cyborg put in her place. The materials are almost all excellent - particularly her mesmerising hit song, the hymnal Be Still My Heart, in which her prayer-like variations were exquisitely and seamlessly picked up and developed by a fine trumpeter, Peter Asplund. Drummer Jarle Vespestad, a softly padding percussionist who rarely touches the snare, took the dynamic levels to extremes. And pianist Tord Gustavsen gave the hardcore jazzers enough uptempo post-bop finger-busting to break the silence with cheers. Only one track - presumably Nergaard's concession to working Ronnie Scott's, an initially funky swinger that turned into a straightforward How High the Moon - seemed anything less than all her own very promising work.
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