Vocalist Tessa Souter is deservedly becoming treasured among jazz fans and musicians alike. She combines the sonority, vocal range and discipline of a classical lieder soprano with subtle and sultry jazz inflections. Everything she sings is meaningful, well thought out and in good taste. She works with the best instrumentalists and has a consummate grasp of both swing and the modern jazz idiom. All these elements are manifest in her newest album, Beyond the Blue, where Souter takes familiar themes from classical music, adds her own lyrics to most of them, and delivers what are essentially a new set of songs that are poetic in impact. The original melodies are all there to be heard, but the mood and interpretation are totally Souter, and all in the jazz idiom, expressing nuances of romance, love and intimacy. She is helped enormously by her instrumentalists, who play masterfully, supporting and elaborating on Souter's vocalizations with finesse and flair.

The album begins gently with Souter's "Prelude to the Sun" based on the second movement of Beethoven's Symphony No.7. While Beethoven wrote a dance-like piece, Souter takes it more slowly, and the lingering dance feeling makes it somewhat like a madrigal, as she refers to "A glorious morning ... singing in my heart."

In "The Lamp is Low" Souter gives Ravel's "Pavane" a midnight dreamy feel, reminiscent of her album Nights of Key Largo (Venus Jazz, 2009). The seduction builds as she asks her lover to "dream the sweetest dream we'll ever know," with her inflections on "sweetest" being perhaps the most decadent single utterance ever sung on a recording, as if Souter became a channel for Marlene Dietrich for a few milliseconds.

"Dance with Me" uses the melody from the popular song "Stranger in Paradise" from the Broadway show Kismet. It is most notable for a flavorful tag ending by