Lively Times
September, 2004
by David Horgan

Jeni Fleming Acoustic Trio: Things I Meant to say...

Jeni Fleming clearly doesn’t want to be pigeonholed. On her new CD, Things I meant to say…, she shows why she is usually dubbed a jazz singer, but she also stakes her claim as a creative interpreter of pop and folk styles.

Such drastic genre-hopping can sometimes jeopardize a performer’s intimate connection with her listeners, but Fleming pulls the trick off. While the 11 songs on this record may come from all over the map, they are delivered straight from the heart.

The session opens with "Mr. Bojangles," Jerry Jeff Walker’s venerable ode in waltz-time to the old man in baggy pants who dances his way through life. You might think after all these decades and countless renditions by everybody from Joan Baez to Willie Nelson that every ounce of sap had already been wrung from this song. Fleming’s reworked version, freely interpreting both melody and chord structure, might surprise you. The effect is to reopen the song, in a sense, so that even those who know it by heart will sit up and listen.

The CD takes on a number of other chestnuts. "Ode To Billie Joe," rendered with minimal production, is another pleasant surprise. Fleming has an affinity for songs with ambiguous messages, and Bobby Gentry’s hit relating those mysterious events up on Choctaw Ridge certainly fits the bill.

Fleming’s supple voice is backed by Chad Langford’s solo bass, nicely evoking the steamy southern-gothic setting of the tale. Jake Fleming contributes supportive saxophone lines and a tasty solo.

Other highlights on the CD include Eden Ahbez’s wonderfully moody minor-key "Nature Boy," another song-as-intimate-story that perfectly suits Fleming’s up-close and personal style, and "Almost A Rainy Day," one of the album’s originals (co-written by Fleming’s father-in-law), which contains the album’s evocative title line: "Things I meant to say…" This tune’s folk-song simplicity, with light electric guitar weaving around the vocal, exemplifies the genre-busting effectiveness of the album’s sound.

Jeni Fleming is an explorer willing to venture far and wide for musical source material, and it will be most interesting to hear where she goes next.

Recorded and engineered by Chad Langford and Jake Fleming at Hitori Company/FTF Productions, Bozeman, MT; Mix and masteered by Rob Tew at SyncLogic, Nashville, TN.

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