Matt White: Matt White's Dolly

A miniature doll-like effigy of the great country music singer-songwriter Dolly Parton adorns the cover of trumpeter-composer Matt White's Dolly. How did the Queen of Country become the subject of this fascinating (if awkwardly-branded) mainstream jazz album? Happenstance.

White was researching Gullah songs for his 2023 album, Lowcountry (Ropeadope), when YouTube "Pandorized" him into a video of a young Parton, guitar in hand, performing "The Bridge," solo, on the Porter Wagoner television show in the '60s. He made a rhythmic connection, and—voilà—the seed was planted.

Working with Liz Kelley, the project's excellent vocalist, White created a little dogma for himself, a set of arranging rules: Keep the vocal melodies and lyrics the same, keep the original keys and all the modulations. "Everything else was open to change." Kelley serves as a solid stand-in for Parton. Her singing style is country—with the requisite cry and twang—but she manages to avoid imitation, coming across as genuine. White has her holding down the melodic fort sans improvisation, which (ties her up you might say, but) frees the band to respond to Parton's songs in a jazz milieu without altering their most recognizeable feature, the vocal line.

The settings are engaging and complex, full of jazz harmonies, melodies and rhythms. And the instrumentalists are superb players and improvisers. Their lines swirl around the vocal ones, alternately in call-and-response fashion, contrapuntally, via ostinatos, in fills and instrumental breaks, and through solo statements.

Between heartwrenching songs of "bad men and birds" (as Kelley put it) written by a very young Parton, "9 to 5" appears in three riveting instrumental settings that feature the powerful rhythm team of Demetrius Doctor on organ and Colleen Clark on drums, preaching the gospel of a hard day's work in brief two-to-three-minute sermons (with fairly equal parts gravity, levity, and liberty). You might even sense a bit of Bud Powell's "Parisian Thoroughfare" (Clifford Brown & Max Roach, Capitol, 1954).

As invigorating and beautifully-performed as the vocal arrangments are, the three instrumental versions of "9 to 5," interspersed throughout the program, stop the show with their freedom and abstraction.

Throughout, the sound of the band is striking. On top are Kelley's vocal eloquence and the fleet grace of White's cornet (he bought one for the occasion), along with Tim Fischer's lyrical guitar. On the bottom, Doctor's prodigious organ and Clark's sizzling, crackling drums, which sometimes walk the line between jazz and country idioms. This is an unusual album without a doubt, one worth more than just a few spins.

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