As sure as the tilted Earth spins around the sun regulating the carousel of seasons, each new Tierney Sutton album seems to garner a Grammy Award nomination.
Since the release of I’m with the Band (2006), nine out of the Los Angeles vocalist’s 10 records have been nominated, mostly in the Best Jazz Vocal category. Her new duo project with ace accompanist Tamir Hendelman, Spring, sounds destined for similar honors.
Though Sutton recorded two gorgeous Paris Sessions albums with her husband, French guitarist Serge Merlaud, Spring is her first duo project with a pianist, and it’s a felicitous pairing on every level.
Hendelman brings a vast array of experience to the partnership. He’s been the accompanist of choice for vocal stars in and adjacent to jazz for the past quarter century, touring and recording with Natalie Cole, Barbra Streisand, Roberta Gambarini, and the Bay Area’s Jackie Ryan.
The duo heads north for a brief run in the coming weeks, performing June 25 at the Brannan Center in Calistoga, June 26 at Libretto, the outstanding jazz outpost in Paso Robles, and two shows June 27 at Oakland’s Piedmont Piano Company. They’re back in the Bay Area for four shows at the SFJAZZ Center’s Joe Henderson Lab Nov. 7-8.
“What I love about working with Tierney is that she’s an instrumentalist and lyric interpreter,” he said on a recent joint video call with Sutton. “When you look at one of her first albums, Unsung Heroes, she’s singing jazz compositions by Joe Henderson and Wayne Shorter, coming up with arrangements that feature the strengths of everyone in the band. At the same time, her appreciation for the craft of lyric writing really draws me to this duo.”
Sutton and Hendelman knew each other for years as leading practitioners on the Southland’s jazz scene but didn’t do much performing together until 2018 when a promoter put together a Japanese tour. Both artists were thrilled by their onstage chemistry and were eagerly anticipating further explorations when the advent of COVID put the kibosh on their plans.
Looking for creative outlets, Hendelman quickly started livestreaming from his living room. With some trial and error, he devised a technical workaround that enabled him to perform with vocalists via Zoom, and within a month he and Sutton were working on “Seasons of Mercer,” a thematic concert focusing on songs by the great lyricist Johnny Mercer.
When they returned to live concertizing in 2021, Sutton and Hendelman felt there was plenty of juice left in the seasonal concept. A private concert in the August heat of Northern California led to a summer-themed program, “and really we enjoyed doing that, focusing in on something,” Sutton said.
Spring is the first recording from their seasonal efforts, and it reflects their deep, wide-ranging repertoire and free-flowing methodology. Hendelman introduced Sutton to the gorgeous title track, a tune by Brazilian songwriter Dori Caymmi and lyricist Tracy Mann introduced by the late Boston jazz vocalist Rebecca Paris.
Their savvy arrangements glean new insights from familiar standards like “Spring Will Be a Little Late This Year” and “You Must Believe in Spring.” The album includes several revelatory pieces, like a sublime interpretation of Paul Simon’s “April Come She Will,” and Hoagy Carmichael’s “I Get Along Without You Very Well,” a piece from their initial seasonal concert that concludes with the lines, “Except perhaps in spring, but I should/ Never think of spring/ For that would surely break my heart in two.” (The story behind that lyric, from a poem by Jane Brown Thompson, is a tale unto itself).
The album’s biggest surprise is “Spring, Spring, Spring” by Mercer and Gene de Paul from the 1954 film musical Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. It’s a sprightly song introduced to Sutton by Alan and Marilyn Bergman, the late, legendary songwriting couple with whom she was close for decades. When she told them she wasn’t familiar with the song, “the two of them started to sing it,” Sutton recalled. “At that moment I knew I wanted to start performing it.”
Sutton sang demos for new Bergman songs for a quarter century, a role she has continued to perform since his death, at 99 last July, working her way through unrecorded pieces from their catalog. (Marilyn died in 2022 at 93.) Sutton and Alan discussed their musical friendship for a 2022 Classical Voice story, and she understandably misses him. “It’s like losing a father, a best friend, and work mentor all in one person,” she said.
Among the Sutton-midwifed Bergman material that will be introduced in the coming months are a set of lyrics he wrote for tunes by guitarist Pat Metheny and a long-neglected piece from the Bergmans’ epochal collaboration with French composer Michel Legrand.
Her proximity to Bergman has stoked the creative fires of her own songwriting efforts, including a work-in-progress with Hendelman on his tune “Playground,” which will be their first song collaboration. “What I like to say is I have a few songs I’m very proud of,” Sutton said. “I don’t consider myself top of the heap, but I know the rules.”
Their devotion to songcraft can be heard on Spring, where they tweaked the Peggy Lee tune “Things Are Swinging.” On a drive together from a gig in Michigan to an engagement in Wisconsin, Sutton remarked that one couplet had always bothered her since it breaks the song’s rhyme scheme: Like an ocean that's in motion/ Like the wind that's blowin' the boat right in to shore
“I said, I think we need to fix it,” Hendelman recalled. It’s not on the album, but when they perform the song, Sutton sings: Like a sail that drinks the mist/ Like a magic potion.
A few weeks later they were performing in LA and Lee’s granddaughter and president of Peggy Lee Associates, Holly Foster Wells, happened to be in the audience. They were a little anxious about her response to their unauthorized editing, “but after the show she said, ‘That’s always bothered me, too,’ so we’re good.”
It was one of the last pieces to fall into place for the new album Spring. Knowing Sutton and Hendelman, the eternal music of the Bergmans will be laced through their seasonal albums-in-progress, Summer, Winter and Fall.
