Since her captivating debut in 2009, jazz vocalist Sylvia Brooks has displayed a gift for inhabiting different personas, with a sub-specialty in film-noir inspired femme fatales.

On this, her fourth brand new album, Signature (Rhombus Records), Brooks embraces the most challenging role of all; defining herself with a set of beautifully crafted original songs.

Her evocative lyrics and emotionally direct delivery imbue the music with hard-won authenticity. Whether looking back with wry affection on her walk-on-the-wild-side youth or lamenting a lost love, Brooks brings bracing honesty and poise to the material.

1. Your Heart Is as Black as Night
2. Catch 22
3. Red Velvet Rope
4. Over and Done
5. The Boy That Lived There
6. Sixteen
7. The Flea Markets of Paris
8. Holding Back Tears
9. Boogie Street

This heartfelt, and wholly organic new album opens on Melody Gardot’s sultry blues within Your Heart Is as Black as Night and the gentle finger-snapper, swingtown wit of Catch 22, and then they are followed by the searingly upbeat and joyous melodies within the cautionary tale Red Velvet Rope (which is set to a sensuous Latin groove by cuatro master Kiki Valera), and then come the quietly-imbued balladry of Over and Done and then an despairingly aching tale is brought forth within The Boy That Lived There.

Along next is the upright bass-led, piano infused, late night club vibe of Sixteen which is in turn backed seamlessly by the atmospherically-charged, passionately romantic The Flea Markets of Paris, the album coming to an all-too-soon close on the veritable gossamer of Holding Back Tears, and then the mid-tempo, bluesy hipsway of the Leonard Cohen/Sharon Robinson erotic lament, the six minute Boogie Street.

Artistically, Brooks has collaborated with Southern California’s most creative accompanists: ace pianists Tom Ranier, Jeff Colella, and Christian Jacob designed beguiling, harmonically rich settings for her incisive lyrics.

The stellar rhythm section tandem of drummer Ray Brinker and bassist Trey Henry appear on almost every track and it also features cellists John Waltz, lead cellist for The Los Angeles Opera Company, Stephanie Fife and Mike Kaufman.

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