Interview The Alison Margaret Quartet de-standardizes the standards

The Alison Margaret Quartet tries to tackle a difficult contrast of moods on its most recent album, Shades Of Morning. Margaret's jazz-vocal style and Geoff Brady's vibraphone tend to float right to the top of the mix like bubbles in champagne, yet the local jazz outfit deliberately reached beyond the jazz-standard songbook, embracing a few somber, reflective, even conflicted numbers. Not that it'll upset those who come to jazz singers for a light and sassy escape: It questions the genre's comfort zones just a little and keeps listeners wise to its emotional range. Between her frequent gigs at The Brink Lounge and Restaurant Magnus (where she'll play in a slightly different setting Friday, Jan. 22, re-creating jazz pianist Keith Jarrett's improvised The Köln Concert), Margaret sat down with The A.V. Club to discuss some of the album's heavier and lighter song selections.

"Danny Boy"

The A.V. Club: This is traditionally such a sad song. Is it challenging to translate that into brighter sounds like the vibes and your vocals?

Alison Margaret: The recording engineer looked at the song list for the album and he later on told me that he was like, "Really? She's doing that tune?" It dates back, I think, to the 1700s, and it went through a bunch of changes. My whole point for this last album was to not do too many jazz standards, to do something completely different. I was finding all these old folk standards that, partly I just thought the melodies were gorgeous, and the lyrics. "The Water Is Wide" is another one that's not very happy, because it's about that longing for love, and lost love.

To really listen to the lyrics of "Danny Boy," they're really sad, but there's something sort of peaceful about it. Obviously, somebody has died, and hoping that they'll be remembered, their loved ones are standing over their grave, and mourning but also celebrating the person's life. The way that I arranged it is I added a couple extra measures here and there so I can really stretch out the melody line where I felt that it needed some more time and some more reflection, so that it emphasized the lyrics. It was more an inspirational moment where this was it and I knew that.

"Happy Talk"

AVC: On the opposite end of the spectrum, this is from the musical South Pacific, which originally had an Asian woman singing it in this borderline-racist pidgin-English style.

AM: [Laughs.] It's really not that good! It's not the most wonderful rendition of that song, by any means. I had no idea that it was from a musical. One of my absolute favorite jazz singers, Nancy Wilson, did a recording with Cannonball Adderley. There's not really a title to the recording. They do all these incredible tunes, and that was the first time I'd ever heard "Happy Talk." I thought it was sort of this fun and playful, almost dreamlike concept of what love is, looking at birds, learning how to fly, and the lake and the water. I imagine a little boy and a little girl holding hands: "Oh, you're my boyfriend, but we're only 7." When I was doing research to put the composers on the album, that's when I actually found out, "Oh, this is from a musical?" and I watched the thing on YouTube. It kind of surprised me.

AVC: So you don't pay attention to much musical-theater stuff?

AM: No, which is kind of funny, because I play with the Music Theater Of Madison. That company tries to do more obscure musicals and off-Broadway stuff. The jazz-standard repertoire, the majority of them, come from musicals that musicians just borrowed and put into the jazz sound.

"It's Alright With Me"

AM: This one's lighthearted but it's not. It's basically saying, "You're the wrong face, you're the wrong smile, but if it's alright with me, let's... have a moment." I see the song as almost being about the rebound guy. That's sort of what it's saying: "You're not the person I imagined I would be with, but why not?" It kind of has this dark overtone to it.

AVC: This is a Cole Porter song that seems very tied to the big-band sound. How do you go about re-arranging a song like this for a quartet?

AM: This arrangement we did collaboratively. Because the big-band version is gonna have the wailing horns and a bit heavier of a sound, we went really, really light with it, which is why we just start out with the drums and voice. It's a simplified concept. We followed the chord chart basically verbatim. The simplicity was kind of a way to arrange it and make it our own, especially when we didn't have all the harmonies of all those instruments. I think if we'd tried to do a full-out arrangement and add some specific parts for the bass player and vibes player to play, it would have lost its light, swingin' feel.