Being such a knockout on both piano and vocals, it's only fitting Waldron should have ace musicians backing her up, and bassist Miriam Sullivan, guitarist Steve Salerno and drummer Michael "T.A" Thompson are every bit her match. In fact one of the CD's best points is the organic sound of the band, as if they'd played together for a million years.

Available at CD Baby here.

Mala Waldron appears at the Jazz Standard in New York City on March 27 for her official CD release, and at Night and Day in Brooklyn NY on June 8 as part of the Soul of the Blues series.

Roberta Chevrette, Miss America

Roberta Chevrette makes a powerful statement with the first two songs on her new CD, Miss America. The instrumental introduction to "Country Girl" establishes her and her band's bluesgrass credentials. The song itself is a two-chord chant about a girl the singer admires — an older sister or someone in that capacity, who "has this easy/way with words...she'll tell me little sister/would you quit your worrying/you know you can do/anything that you want" — but then comes the kicker: "and i remember back/to all those years ago/to when she tried to kill me/on the living room floor/with a pair of scissors/in her hand." Then the song closes with a verse about "going out to the country/where i belong" and a dog in the backseat, "to the country/where we feel/complete." No more mention of the older girl. It's like a miniature experimental novel in a few verses.

"Every Wind" is even more powerful, a drony Led Zeppelin-style folk song about a relationship going cold, which is the stuff of millions of songs but expressed with exceptional intensity here. Chevrette's voice, not little-girlie yet usually small and childlike, soars to anguished heights on the choruses.

In "Miss America" the singer rejects artifical glamour in favor of inner beauty; she doesn't "want to be demure or lovely/sweet or nice/or sit back quietly/while others think for me." But then Chevrette goes one step beyond the expected, adding a final line: "i don't want to be pretty."

If you're detecting an Ani DiFranco influence, you're not imagining it. "Your Words," in fact, is a poem directed straight at DiFranco, acknowledging a debt. Sounds a little tiresome, I know, but something about Chevrette's laser-focused delivery makes it not so. Though the poem swerves into an indictment of Bush's Iraq war, the political theme is picked up at greater length in the slightly too obvious "Long Long Day." The minimalist, spoken-word "How Long" is a more effective protest song. And in the midst of it all, the bluegrass romp "Bear Tracks" reminds us that this singer-songwriter isn't all lasers and ice.