This new album from Australian-born, NYC-based vocalist Jo Lawry is a fearless, freewheeling delight. Composed by fellow Aussie singer Gian Slater, the lyrical sentiments (“Acrobats spend their time trying to stay on the wire”), vertiginous melodic leaps and metrical tricks of the title track serve as the aesthetic foundation for the album as a whole, which sees agility and playfulness commingling with risk and trust.

The album is framed by the music of one of Lawry's favourite Tin Pan Alley songsmiths, Frank Loesser – she discovered the perfectly apposite opener ‘Travelling Light’ on An Evening with Frank Loesser, a collection of previously unreleased demo recordings Loesser made for Guys and Dolls which DRG issued in 1992. Eschewing the harmonic safety net of a piano or guitar, Lawry takes the melodic line of the standard ‘Taking a Chance on Love’ down several horn-like pathways, while the trio becomes a duo on brilliant reworkings of ‘You're the Top’ (featuring Lawry and Miller) and ‘Takes Two to Tango’ (featuring Lawry and Oh), the latter excerpted from one of Lawry's all-time favourite albums, Ray Charles and Betty Carter.

Lawry's scat on the venerably ancient vaudeville classic ‘Deed I Do’, and her wordless voyage through Lennie Tristano's ‘317 East 32nd Street’, epitomise the ludic spirit which exists between the trio, while fans of the aforementioned Guys and Dolls are treated to a trio of inventively recast songs from the beloved musical, ‘My Time of Day'/'I've Never Been in Love Before’ plus the deeply swinging bonus track ‘If I Were a Bell’.