Tawanda, ‘Smile’
(Resonance Records)

The good news is that there’s a new singer on the jazz scene, and she’s terrific. Her full name is Tawanda Suessbrich-Joaquim — her mother is German, and her father is from Mozambique — so it will surprise no one that she uses her first name only for her stage billing. She is the winner of the 2021 Sarah Vaughan International Jazz Competition, following the equally talented Samara Joy, who won in the pre-pandemic year of 2019.  Tawanda has just released her first album, “Smile,” and launched it with a show at Birdland.

Young artists tend to take iconic figures as role models: When Veronica Swift, who is still only 28, first emerged, she loudly trumpeted her allegiance to Anita O’Day; Jazzmeia Horn, now 31, sounded like the second coming of Betty Carter; the formidable Nicolas King — if you don’t know him, you really should — proudly carries the mantle of Mel Torme, even while somehow managing to be even shorter, physically, than the original.  

When I first put on Tawanda’s album, the similarity to Dianne Reeves was unmistakable, though it’s less so in person — either that’s a trick of the recording process, or, equally likely, she’s matured more in her own direction in the months since the sessions. It’s notable that she gravitated toward a living artist; Ms. Reeves, who is more active than ever, is 40 years older than Tawanda, who is 26. “A Child is Born,” “Bridges,” and Eddie del Barrio’s “I’m Okay” all derive from Ms. Reeves’s catalog, and Tawanda’s “What a Little Moonlight Can Do” is the first I’ve heard that leans more toward Ms. Reeves than Billie Holiday.

That underscores certain other points. The first time I interviewed Ms. Reeves, when she was roughly Tawanda’s age, she felt that younger performers, instrumentalists or singers — and men more so than women — have a harder time doing ballads. Young musicians tend to want to play as loud and fast as possible; the ability to essay a slow, romantic song develops with maturity.

Yet Tawanda has reached a very high level at a remarkably early age — she’s already a formidable balladeer, and those involved story-songs are the high points of “Smile.” The album includes a devastating reading of Milton Nascimento’s “Bridges,” influenced at least slightly by Ms. Reeves’s 1999 version but clearly its own animal, using a full string section (or a reasonable facsimile). She shows how the achingly melancholy “Sack Full of Dreams,” by jazz arranger Gary McFarland, who died at 38 in 1971, is, sadly, no less relevant than it was in 1968. Jeff Harris’s “Bring Back My Dreamer” (the only other version I’ve heard is by the excellent Maureen McGovern) is another superior example of musical storytelling.

Here’s the punchline, though: None of those three remarkable ballads was heard at Birdland. Instead she surprised us with other no-less moving story songs: “The Peacocks,” British singer Norma Winstone’s lyric to Jimmy Rowles’s rambling, Billy Strayhorn-ish melody; the always-welcome “Angel Eyes,” and “Dance Me to The End of Love” — a performance that Tawanda should gift to Blue Note Records, which disappointingly overlooked the song on its new tribute to Leonard Cohen. 

The uptempo numbers seem less the point, but we need them for variety at least, especially in live performance. She opened with “It Don’t Mean a Thing,” absolutely as exciting as we wanted it to be. The album, less effectively, opens with a medley of “Smile” and “I’m All Smiles” — first-rate treatments of two classics that should be in two separate tracks, not least because they’re in two different time signatures. Her “Them There Eyes” reminded me of the way that Sarah Vaughan used brief uptempo versions of standards as kind of short, swinging chasers between bigger, more dramatic numbers. 

Both the album and the Birdland show rank among the best debuts I’ve ever heard. The live show was especially enriched by the playing of a veteran bassist, Marco Panacea, and drummer, Tim Horner. That was even more so with John DiMartino, a superlative pianist who competes with Keith Jarrett in the acute contrast between his beautiful harmonies and bizarro facial expressions. (The fine album charts are the work of Josh Nelson and Tamir Hendelman.)

And now for the bad news: Come to think of it, there isn’t any bad news.