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The pleasures of jazz singer Bernadette Seacrest’s latest recording project are not exclusively auditory, though those are, predictably, seductive.
Her My Love Is comes with frame-worthy album art: an eye-popping, symbolism-heavy, Surrealist photograph of the “jazzabilly chanteuse” all but baring her naughty bits, taken by Joel-Peter Witkin, the deliciously deviant “thinking Goth’s favorite artist.”
“The whole reason I decided to make this a 12-inch album is because of the cover art,” Seacrest says. “It feels a little bizarre to be sharing such an intimate photograph of myself with the world, but I’m really proud of it and so honored that Joel would allow me to use it. Stepping into his studio was like being painted by Picasso. I love that the image is so dark and vulnerable with a crazy beauty in it.”
In fact, “dark and vulnerable with a crazy beauty” sums up this old-school torch singer, who was a campy mainstay of Sister Louisa’s Church of the Living Room and Ping Pong Emporium. Seacrest is not so much “retro” as irresistibly retrofitted. A siren with an edgy, modern sensibility and the looks of a pulp-fiction pinup, she blends jazz, blues and lounge music into a genre she calls “swing noir.” Not surprisingly, she enjoys an enthusiastic following in France.
Seacrest always croons, swoons, and grooves like the rebel niece of Peggy Lee, evoking the Squirrel Nut Zippers and White Ghost Shivers — only spicier and more shadowy. The prominent bass, rhythm, and “heavy bottom” in her music serve as a masculine counterweight to her languorous, femme fatale vocals. “You’ll never get away from the ‘heaviness’ with me,” she says.
For My Love Is, her fifth release in the form of a three-song EP, she experiments with a new direction, with help from her faithful sidemen, Kris Dale and Darren Stanley, and it fits her like prized fishnets. You would never know it from the zephyr-like breath work of her jazz vocals, but Seacrest used to be a punk rocker (she has the word “f–k” tattooed inside her lower lip).
For the first song, “Jezebel,” she proves that she can still belt, full-throated, with the best of the bad girls. The second track is a cover of Pat Bova’s “Vampire,” a sassy romp through late-night drinks and after-hours seduction, complete with wonky, wildly offbeat percussive elements that evoke Tom Waits. The title song hews closer to her earlier work. Seacrest, a native of Venice Beach, California, listened to a lot of Billie Holiday in her teens, and it shows in her plangent vocals frilled here and there with controlled melisma. She purrs like a cream-sated kitten.
Seacrest is always looking to touch more than your heart. “This album accesses that guttural, pelvis, root chakra,” she says. “The music is, for lack of a better word, sensual. I’m not a cerebral person. I can’t play with musicians who are.”
So My Love Is only offers three songs, but consider them an amuse-bouche to whet your appetite for Seacrest’s entire catalog. Her previous albums — the titles hint at her winking relationship with her accompanists and other collaborators — include: The Filthy South Sessions, An Evening with Bernadette Seacrest and Her Yes Men and Bernadette Seacrest and Her Provocateurs.
Seacrest has a way of unfurling her voice like a bolt of cashmere — warm, luxuriant and conducive to touching. Her repertoire becomes every nighthawk’s songbook. Those lush nocturnes and bawdy lullabies have long provided a soundtrack for the demimonde of wayward lovers, artists, misfits, world-weary jesters, scruffy boulevardiers, loose women, men-about-town and others in her constituency.
“I’m so fortunate that I can release myself through my music and touch that place inside of me that I have such a hard time articulating,” she says. “Darkness is just my style. I embrace it and love it, but there’s something very hopeful in it, too. It’s real.”
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Candice Dyer’s work has appeared in magazines such as Atlanta, Garden and Gun, Georgia Trend and other publications. She is the author of Street Singers, Soul Shakers, Rebels with a Cause: Music from Macon.
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