Monica Ramey’s latest release, Make Someone Happy, features a cast of prime local jazz players including Lori Mechem, Roger Spencer, Chris Brown and a special appearance by Beegie Adair.
In general, it’s fairly easygoing jazz music, with solid, pleasing female vocals, courtesy of Ramey herself. While there’s really not much of a Southern accent in her voice, or a country twang to the music, there seems to be something intangibly “Nashville” about the record, and it would be quite appropriate for the Opryland days.
The vocalist primarily gives the impression of a hard-working singer belting out the same tunes in a cozy little jazz club night after night to pay the bills. The material is certainly professional and easy to listen to, but it is nothing incredibly extraordinary.
However, the record contains a few of those special moments where her vocal capabilities are really utilized to their fullest potential, proving Ramey does indeed have an extraordinary and powerful voice. Track one, “Hey John,” builds to a powerful and soulful belting out of “John” a little over a minute into the track. However, this comes amongst a large handful of less captivating pronouncements of “John.” I understand music must have valleys to have peaks; a piece must have a buildup to have a climax, but the album has more of those moments faded into the background than the attention-grabbing jewels.
The instrumentation is a nice jazzy mix of woodwinds, brass, guitar, piano, bass and drums, though the music is never too busy at once, and it mainly falls closer to the “nightclub combo” end of the spectrum, rather than “big band.”
Some sweet solo lines and modulations keep the music interesting, but in contrast to rock, which screams for attention, the jazz aesthetic is more in the background in general, where each player aims to accentuate what the others are doing more so than stand out from the crowd, even with the more virtuosic phrases.
Ramey definitely gets some bonus points for keeping alive Cole Porter’s rhyme of “Strauss” and “Mickey Mouse” in “You’re the Top.”
In the end, Make Someone Happy has some passages after a few listens that will stick in my head, and it has made this music fan’s life just a bit more happy. I get the feeling Ramey is truly happy singing these tunes as well, and the record is a great success if she, I and a few other people get a little dose of joy from the music. Isn’t that—making someone happy—music’s most pure objective?
