Roubini’s voice will grab you, the understated musicianship and Pigat’s arrangements make it as comfortable at a dinner party as it is under a pair of headphones.
Cellar Live
Daphne Roubini – Vocals, Band Leader, Composer; Paul Pigat – Guitar, Arranger, Composer; Stephen Nikleva – Guitar, Composer; Dave Say – Saxophone; Brad Turner – Flugelhorn, Trumpet; Jeremy Holmes – Bass
There is no mistaking Daphne Roubini’s voice. In a landscape crowded with jazz vocalists who’ve absorbed the same influences and arrived at roughly the same sound, the Vancouver singer and Black Gardenia bandleader is genuinely distinctive. Whisky Scented Kisses, the group’s debut on Cellar Live, is nine tracks built around that voice — small-group, unhurried, steeped in the harmonic sensibility of the 1940s and ’50s, and played with enough conviction that the tradition feels inhabited rather than imitated.
Conversational rather than theatrical, she phrases with the ease of someone thinking aloud, never pushing, never grasping for effect. There’s a little-girl quality to the tone — echoes of Blossom Dearie come to mind — though the sensibility behind it leans closer to Billie Holiday. “Am I Crazy?” captures this perfectly, her vocals floating over quiet guitar and barely-there horn lines as though the question were already half-answered.
The title track crystallizes what makes Roubini’s songwriting stand out. Whisky breath and a smoky room aren’t the most seductive of images on paper, but Roubini has said she loves “visual songs that paint a picture,” and here that philosophy is fully evident. Her voice arrives as if lost in thought, reaching back toward something half-remembered. You can almost feel her shaping each note as she goes — not uncertain, but deliberate, as if every pitch is a small decision about what to give and what to hold back.
The original compositions anchor the set, but the chosen standards earn their place. Much of the credit goes to Paul Pigat, whose spare arrangements keep the focus on melody and lyric without ever cluttering the space around them. “You Leave Me Breathless” brings a welcome lift in energy, Roubini swinging her phrases with quiet wit and humor, while “This Year’s Kisses,” offered as a tribute to Billie Holiday, finds Dave Say’s saxophone and Brad Turner’s trumpet trading phrases with real swing.
A highlight is “There’s Always Tomorrow,” a song Mimi Marlowe Jaffe wrote at nineteen in 1950, never recorded, and unheard until after her death at ninety-one. Quietly hopeful, written from a place that acknowledges life doesn’t always cooperate, it’s a small gem that fits the album perfectly.
“Who Stole the Moon?” makes for a fine closer, its bouncy rhythm the most playful on the record, Nikleva’s guitar locked into the driving chop of a gypsy jazz rhythm guitarist before opening up into pedal-treated single note runs shimmering with reverb and echo, the sax adding light punctuation throughout.
In a crowded field of vocal jazz releases, Whisky Scented Kisses earns its place easily. Roubini’s voice will grab you, the understated musicianship and Pigat’s arrangements make it as comfortable at a dinner party as it is under a pair of headphones.
