“Debby Yeager called me from out of the blue soliciting liner notes. I didn’t know her, never heard her sing and was not particularly predisposed to reviewing or writing about vocalists in the first place. But there was something about her persuasive manner on the phone that led me to check out her tape. She told me she had produced and financed the project herself. Frankly, I was expecting the worst. Cabaret fluff interspersed with the occasional jazz standard rendered with the stiffness of someone who didn’t know Bob Dorough from Bob Barker. BOY WAS I WRONG!
Ms. Yeager delivers these 12 tunes with the inherent soulfulness and shrewd sense of syncopation that mark all great jazz singers. Her phrasing exudes a relaxed confidence and musicality that conjures up such classy singers as Annie Ross and Flora Purim. And, oh yes, she knows who bob Dorough is. He appears here singing alongside Debby on a reworking of the 1968 classic Nothing Like You.
The title of Debby’s debut, Mood Swing, is clever for two reasons. It shifts moods from Brazilian sambas to jazz standards to Latin jazz while revealing her infinite capacity to swing, perhaps best exemplified here on the breezy New Song and on her own Pucker Up, co-written with bassist Eric Stiller. She demonstrates a genuine feel for Brazilian music on My Little Boat, Reza, sung in Portuguese, and a sensual, samba-fied version of the Johnny Mathis ballad Chances Are. She turns in a smoldering performance on Mark Massey’s hip Afro-Cuban arrangement of the Horace Silver classic Señor Blues (catch the quote from Wayne Shorter’s Footprints). And she even imbues pop material like Summer Dreams with a jazzy sensibility (hear her toss in quotes from All Blues and Devil May Care at the tag.) Her haunting, emotional reading of You Don’t Know What Love Is carries the pain of longing and loss. And on the lighter side she delivers True Turtle Tale, a spoken word ditty, with all the bohemian charm of Al Jazzbeau Collins.
For this auspicious debut, Debby surrounds herself with a crew of top shelf musicians. Fretless electric bassist Marco Mendoza throws down scintillating grooves on My Little Boat and Señor Blues while saxophonist Doug Webb blows some brilliant tenor on Pucker Up and the churning Latin jazz closer, Songo Mongo. Guitarist Frank Potenza offers a flowing guitar break on New Song and trumpeter Oscar Brashear, a member of the Silver Brass Ensemble, gets to stretch on Nothing Like You and Señor Blues, which also features some additional lyrics written by Ms. Yeager. Pianist Massey is prominently featured throughout and Debby herself contributes the music arrangement to The Day It Rained.
A highly satisfying first outing; and hopefully the first of many to come.” –Bill Milkowski, Downbeat Magazine