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Maria Neckam: Deeper

  Tobias Fischer

There’s a quilt of snark lain over this disaffect-o-matic wine-and-cheese jazz-pop chick’s tunes – all of them self-written, a nice switch.

Could be the fact that she’s a cute 20something dressed retro Laurie Petrie and wearing an Audrey Hepburn smirk, but more likely it’s because her default flow is pure Joni Mitchell, that know-it-all of yore – not until “When You’re In Love” does Neckam bust out of her half-there scat-and-murmur routine and do a little belting, as if all of a sudden she was told to throw together something for a Juno-type movie. That’s at song number 4, after which she does an obtuse Mingus-ish sing-along with one of her 2 sax guys (“Fear”) that soon becomes a prog thing, then a beatnik jam-out thing, then a colorfully animated marathon scat that reveals her as a serious, ambitious experimentalist. 

The whole thing reminded me it’s time to open my bedtime medicinal pinot noir, which is pretty much the tale of this thing’s tape.

By Eric Saeger

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