Not quite there

Reviewed August 2007

Seeking to inhabit the same hip young crooner niche as Michael Buble and Peter Cincotti, Jonny Blu has a nice vocal delivery but – at least on his new album – lacks the sort of presence that let a young Harry Connick Jr. claim Sinatra's mantle a generation ago and is leading Buble and Cincotti to the same status.

In terms of the tone and hues of his voice, Blu sounds closer to Nat "KIng" Cole" than Sinatra.

But on covers of "King of the Road" and "Girl From Ipanema," Blu's breezy delivery betrays him. His performance is too lightweight to lend the songs the kind of gravitas that allows their humor to shine through.

Blu has all the natural talent in the world, and has written several nice songs for this album. But he needs to polish his delivery – to, as Tony Bennett once put it, learn how to walk on stage properly if he wants to be more than a blip on the radar screen of the jazz world.

Review by Jim Trageser. Jim is a writer and editor living in Escondido, Calif., and was a contributor to the "Grove Press Guide to Blues on CD" (1993) and "The Routledge Encyclopedia of the Blues" (2005).