Octogenarian French saxophonist and composer Gerard ‘Doudou’ Gouirand has played and recorded with many jazz greats across the decades: his mentor, Don Cherry, Paul Bley, Bobo Stenson, Jeanne Lee, Archie Shepp and many more. But on this charming, deeply personal disc he doesn’t blow a note. Instead he just sings. The session, with pianist Jean-Sébastien Simonoviev and drummer Joël Allouche, took a single afternoon and was reportedly done ‘without pre-defined arrangements’. Most of the tunes are jazz standards or drawn from the Great American Songbook – ‘Nature Boy’, ‘Naima’, ‘My One And Only Love’, ‘Blue Bolero’ – supplemented with three Gouirand originals, including the title track. Simonoviev and Allouche ebb and flow with the freedom that only great natural musical sympathy can engender, while Gouirand’s voice scrambles and climbs around and above them with elegant, painstaking fragility on the likes of ‘I Fall In Love Too Easily’ – to beguiling and unique effect.