Madeleine Peyroux

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slowness, and she couldn't mimic Smith's big, brassy original. So she gave it a new seductiveness, cute and sly. Though just twenty-two when she recorded it, she convinced you that she'd grown old enough to control the men who used to drive her wild.

Peyroux's first album, Dreamland (1996), sold 200,000 copies, a huge success for a jazz album, and her voice's quirky, Holiday-like timbre was surely one reason. Expert, minimalist accompaniment helped too, from such star jazzmen as saxophonist (and Detroit native) James Carter and pianist Cyrus Chestnut.

By the time Peyroux recorded the album, she'd already lived in New Orleans, New York, and Paris, singing with bands and busking on streets. So the album's biggest strength was its huge range: she covered jazz standards, blues, Patsy Cline, and Edith Piaf, uniting the genres and generations into one clear, pure sound. She couldn't always reach as deeply into the lyrics as her heroines had, but she reawakened the songs with her sunny, sweet personality. No one will ever balance the romance and haunted loss in "Walkin' after Midnight" as perfectly as Cline, so where the Cowboy Junkies once went for haunted, Peyroux let the song be romantic.