# CD review: Alan Broadbent – Burlesque 2021: Video, CD cover

- Link: https://jazzblues.eu/2021/07/12/cd-review-alan-broadbent-burlesque-2021-video-cd-cover/
- Published: 2021-07-12T21:27:08+01:00
- Author: https://JazzBlues.EU

**It’s almost exactly four years since their debut album, Songbook, was glowingly
received. If this, their second, had turned out to be more of the same, no one would
have complained.**

But one small difference brings a subtle and fascinating change to the music of 
singer-lyricist Georgia Mancio and pianist-composer Alan Broadbent. Instead of the
conventional bass-and-drums accompaniment, there’s just the two of them – voice 
and piano. Perhaps it’s the intimacy this creates, or the added concentration it
calls for, but there’s an intensity to these nine songs beyond what was there before.
Maybe even the brevity of each song adds to the effect; only two of them run for
more than five minutes.

Mancio’s tales of love, family, loss and hope are deceptively simple on paper but
touchingly persuasive when she sings them. There’s no particular rhyme scheme or
verse form, but all the songs follow the same pattern in performance, with a piano
solo in the middle. Broadbent seems incapable of playing an unmelodic phrase, and
these brief solos are all gloriously free and imaginative, while always in keeping
with the mood of the piece.

pi

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