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It’s not every groove-driven vocal jazz album where you’ll find the piano-pounding singer cheekily beatboxing before she launches into a Clifford Brown tune (with her own original lyrics), but that’s one of the subtle tricks that make Montreal transplant Elizabeth Shepherd’s debut LP so exhilaratingly fresh – and entirely her own. This is hard-bopping jazz that commands you to move, buoyed by Shepherd’s technical prowess and the laid-back, masterful beats of rhythm section Colin Kingsmore and Scott Kemp. It’s wholly contemporary – Shepherd’s ties to the Do Right hiphop scene give her dance-floor details an unself-conscious air – without resorting to the overly intellectual navel-gazing of, say, a Patricia Barber disc. That’s not to say Shepherd isn’t familiar with the classics (just check out the opening title track, a literal intro to the performer and her roots), but she makes them fully her own, as with her speedy scatted take on the Miles Davis/Jon Hendricks track Four, or her beautifully circular Herbie Hancock tribute, Melon. And goddamn, you can’t help but adore a girl who’s unafraid to cover the Price Is Right theme.
