Still Life

Following up on their 2021 duo release, Midnight Shelter, vocalist Sachal Vasandani and pianist Romain Collin maintain their sparse, surpassingly intimate, and expressive connection on Still Life. The song choices, even more striking this time, speak again to the broad tastes and interpretive abilities of these masterful jazz artists. Thus Billie Eilish, Bonnie Raitt, James Bay, Patti LaBelle, and Peter Gabriel all inspire the duo’s reverence for melody and message, on the same continuum as the Bill Evans/Miles Davis standard “Blue in Green” from Kind of Blue (sung with an original lyric by Meredith d’Ambrosio). Collin’s piano accompaniments are sublimely simple, never getting in the way. Vasandani conveys a stark sense of the voice as an instrument, in his use of timbre and in the way he sculpts every note, weighs every vowel and consonant. It makes folk songs as familiar as “The Sound of Silence” and Elizabeth Cotten’s “Freight Train” sound new, no less than originals like Vasandani’s “No More Tears” and Collin’s “How Could We Be.”