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Sarah Moule

A Lazy Kind of Love

Red Ram Records RAM001

Although she does occasionally scat and is clearly influenced by jazz phrasing, Sarah Moule is best described ­ as in her publicity material ­ as ‘one of the UK’s foremost interpreters of modern song’.

On this Red Ram album (a previous couple were made for Linn), she concentrates her intelligent and subtle vocal powers on material written by an extraordinarily fertile songwriting team, pianist Simon Wallace and Fran Landesman.

Their songs range from the sensuous title-track (co-written with Julie Birchill), given an appropriately languorous treatment by Moule, through sexily witty blues-based pieces (‘Hyde Side Blues’, which addresses the Jekyll and Hyde theme from a slightly unusual angle) to wry explorations of the emotional balancing acts involved in love affairs ­ all impeccably delivered by Moule, who is able to express both straightforward emotion and artily literate complexities (‘You’re an island of Chekhov in a Disney throng’) with equal ease and assurance.

With the originals tastefully complemented by a couple of standards, the Styne/Cahn classic ‘I Fall in Love Too Easily’ (delicately latinised) and the Bob Dorough/Terrell Kirk Jr swinger ‘Devil May Care’ (which brings to mind Claire Martin, whom Moule slightly resembles in her ability to combine conversational informality with discreet artfulness), and the whole flawlessly performed by the core band of Wallace himself, bassist Mark Hodgson/Alec Dankworth and drummer Paul Robinson ­ sporadically supplemented by guitarist Mike Outram, shakuhachi player Clive Bell, saxophonist Alan Barnes and percussionist Paul Clarvis ­ this is a fine album that manages to combine immediate accessibility with considerable subtlety.