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The Laurie Lewis Quintet with Heather Stewart: A Sense of Wonder

This is a pleasant album to have noodling away in the background at a dinner party. The mood is summery and easy, in the jazz tradition of Astrid Gilberto, as defined by the similarly light vocalisations of student jazz singer Heather Stewart. This style can also be perceived as uninvolved and non-emotional and when applied across all the songs, regardless of different lyrical contents, the effect is a certain blandness. All songs are written by former NZ residents Alwyn and Laurie Lewis (some 20 years since). Laurie Lewis is also saxophonist and arranger. Recorded in Australia, local-to-there guitarist Doug De Vries deserves special mention for his outstanding solos. The vocalist, while possessing a light and often lovely tone, cannot seem to fully handle the genre. This becomes especially obvious on the changes in Frangipani, a track the saxophone also seems to struggle on. Indeed there are trifling intonation problems for both sax and vocals on several tracks, but if the object was to write and record all new songs that sound seamlessly to be that of a past era, then it is nicely achieved.

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