At a time when it seems that everyone is a jazz singer releasing new music in a male-female distribution of 1 to 10, what is it exactly that separates the merely good singers from the truly great ones. Because of the sheer number of singers and relative high quality of jazz singing today, it is brutally hard for a singer to register above the base noise he or she is surrounded with. Equally hard is critical evaluation of such music. But there are still qualities that isolate that superb few. One of these is purity of voice.

Singer Kate McGarry hails from a musical childhood in Massachusetts that led to African-American musical studies at Amherst. A fine pedigree by any estimation. But rather than nurture a technical/theoretical singing facility, McGarry instead began to cultivate a more organic and fertile vocal style, partially under the tutelage of tenor saxophonist