Multilingual Jackie Ryan sings with conviction, emotion and clarity

Jazz critics tend to be cynical about female singers — there are so many bad ones! — so when a CD like Jackie Ryan's "Passion Flower" arrives, as it did five years ago, it's an occasion for cheering out loud.

Ryan's the real item. She doesn't just sing beautifully and in tune, but with the kind of conviction that makes you feel her life depended on your understanding what she was saying.

Back in 2002, there were only a few of us cheering.

With her most recent disc, "You and the Night and the Music," this outstanding San Francisco Bay Area artist has finally started to get some traction.

The disc perched atop the 2007 radio airplay charts for six months and catapulted her to appearances at Dizzy's, the wonderful New York nightclub, and — better for us — finally, to Seattle.

Ryan performs at 8 p.m. and 9:15 p.m. today and Saturday on the "Visiting Songbirds" series at the Issaquah supper club, Bake's Place.

It's a cliché, but Ryan seems to have been born to sing. Her parents met in a choir in an immigrant neighborhood of San Francisco that used to be called "Butcher Town." Her father sang Schubert lieder while making a living as a chemical engineer in the Richmond oil refineries. Her mother, originally from Acapulco, Mexico, appeared in operettas in Guadalajara, and sang in Spanish around the house.

"The music I grew up with was really my mother's Spanish songs," Ryan said in a phone interview last week from her home in Mill Valley, not far from where she grew up, in San Rafael. "I'm not fluent, but if I sing a Spanish song, something happens. I don't have a problem with [expressing] emotion."

That's an understatement. On "You and the Night," Ryan even revitalizes the war horse "Bésame Mucho," delivering it at a hauntingly slow tempo, backed with rich jazz piano chords.

Ryan not only sings well in English and Spanish, but in Portuguese and Italian, as well.

"I don't just do it phonetically," she said. "I try to know what I'm talking about. Some music, you just have to do in its own language. I can't imagine [Portuguese] fado music sung in English."

Ryan started out as an R&B singer, belting out Otis Redding and Gladys Knight tunes, week in and week out, until she "blew her voice out," she said. While taking time off, she discovered the sparkling inventions of "vocalese" singers like King Pleasure, Eddie Jefferson and Jon Hendricks, who put words to jazz solos. Ryan has been a jazz singer ever since.

She's even written her own words to solos by Joe Henderson and Wayne Shorter and, recently, Benny Carter's "Doozy."

But Ryan's gift isn't about fancy footwork, it's about getting over, straight from the heart.

On "Never Let Me Go," a ballad by Ray Evans (who wrote "Mona Lisa"), she sings with sultry sensuality but also great clarity, a rare combination. Composers Alan and Marilyn Bergman wrote Ryan to say how much they liked her new album, which includes a flowing bossa nova version of their tune, "Moonlight."

Ryan has the good sense to surround herself with great musicians, among them pianist Tamir Hendelman, who on her album provides a re-

harmonized vamp to Ryan's swinging edition of "The Best is Yet To Come."

That tune's title says it all. This "songbird" has a great career ahead of her.

But see for yourself. Samples of Ryan's music are online at www.jackieryan.com. Better yet, come out and hear her live at Bake's.

Paul de Barros: 206-464-3247

or pdebarros@seattletimes.com