Born in Washington, DC and raised in Greenville, North Carolina, vocalist Christie Dashiell honed her skills at Howard University (where she now teaches) and the Manhattan School of Music. A recipient of DownBeat magazine’s Best College Graduate Jazz Vocalist and Outstanding Soloist awards in the jazz vocal category, Dashiell possesses a sumptuously rich timbre, a powerful storytelling gift and the ability to craft songs which lodge immediately in the heart.

Her second album Journey in Black brings together seven fabulous originals and a brace of adroitly reimagined covers. The imposing album opener ‘Ancestral Folk Song’ begins with a thunderous, free time clarion call featuring the full band, followed by verse-chorus sections which vibrate between 5/4 and 6/4 time – and then the surprise, a beautiful, unforeseen spoken word coda accompanied by piano only (“There she lies, the glow of dusk on her face, as she dances through here and now”). Dashiell offers especially creative takes on ‘Anyone Who Had a Heart’, the 1963 hit song written by Burt Bacharach and Hal David for Dionne Warwick, and ‘Invitation’, a firm favourite of vocalists including Sarah Vaughan, Andy Bey and Patricia Barber and a tune also recorded by Coltrane on his 1958 album Standard Coltrane. On the entirely a cappella ‘Always Stay’, Dashiell delivers the plangent melodic line over four-part wordless textures that gently caress the ears, and she fashions further ear-catching vocal harmonies on ‘The Things You Do’, a track which is also graced by a crisply articulated muted trumpet solo from guest Marquis Hill.