Bellingham Weekly
Amy Kepferle

Jeni Fleming possesses a voice made for singing and storytelling. Lyrical without being cloying, strong without being clamorous and able to travel seamlessly among growling jazz ballads, folk offerings and, yes, even Cyndi Lauper tunes, what pours forth from her vocal cords makes one sit up and take notice.

Fleming and her musical cohorts--including her husband Jake, who handles acoustic and electric guitar duties, alto and tenor sax, mandolin and background vocals, and master bassist Chad Langford--will illuminate the new Studio Theatre at the Mount Baker Theatre with their sounds this weekend. If you're looking for an intimate, relaxing night out replete with music that is likely to tingle your spine, the Bozeman, Montana trio are a good bet.

After a couple listens through the ensemble's two albums, 2002's The Trinity Tour and this year's Things I Meant To Say, it's clear that although jazz is a strong influence on the group it doesn't come near to defining the breadth of their varied sounds. Familiar songs like "Mr. Bojangles" take on new, languorous twists with the trio's treatment and specifically Jeni's voice, which soothes as it dips and slaloms with what seems to be an abundance of emotional honesty.

More folksy tunes like Bobbie Gentry's "Ode To Billie Joe" fit well even when placed along[side] Rodger's and Hammerstein's "If I Loved You" and the aforementioned Cyndi Lauper's "Time After Time." Throw in a rendition of "The Girl From Ipanema," --in Portuguese with a new string arrangement by Jake Fleming--the jazz standard "Twisted" and a bit of Thelonious Monk and it becomes hard to separate where the originals begin and the extraordinary renditions take over.

"That's the cool thing about a jazz tune, isn't it," writes Jeni on the liner notes of Things I Meant To Say. "I mean, it's meant to be 'made over' every time somebody sings it."

Perhaps what allows the Jeni Fleming Acoustic Trio to gel so well is that the musicians have been working together for a number of years after first meeting while they were students at Montana State University. All are classically trained, but it wasn't until they had been collaborating together for a while--both professionally and personally--that they became committed to furthering their careers through a ballast of jazz music and becoming full-time musicians.

Jeni played the piano for 22 years, but it wasn't until meeting her future husband that she took command of her vocal capabilities and started exploring the improvisationally-inclined nature of jazz.