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Frida Kahlo 1938 painting ‘What the Water Gave Me’ ( ‘Lo que el agua me dio’) . Photo: Wikipedia

I only found out – just a fluke, really – about this adventurously surrealist inspired new release by Dutch singer Sara Bax by looking at the Challenge Records website. You can’t Google a name if you don’t know the name. It’s a problem with new artists – how to even get someone’s name on the tip of some potential listener’s tongue let alone for that person to dedicate the time, energy and commitment to listen and then go on a musical trip with a complete stranger.

Te vas Alfonsina con tu soledad
Qué poemas nuevos fuiste a buscar…?
Una voz antigua de viento y de sal
Te requiebra el alma y la está llevando
Y te vas hacia allá como en sueños,
Dormida, Alfonsina, vestida de mar

You leave, Alfonsina, with your solitude.
What new poems were you seeking?
An old voice of wind and salt
Breaks your soul and takes it away,
And you go towards it, as if in dreams,
Asleep, Alfonsina, clothed by the sea.

[A key portion of the Félix Luna lyrics for the Ariel Ramírez melody – English translation by Nicolas Mulroy.]

“She’s the Poem is a series of ten poetic portraits varying from someone you could run into on the streets to an icon like Frida Kahlo,” explains the label. Bax, singing in multiple languages including English, Portuguese, Spanish and Dutch has written the songs apart from covering the much interpreted ‘Alfonsina y el mar’ synonymous with Mercedes Sosa.

The setting is shaped around a piano, bass, cello + flugelhorn pared back accompaniment. Tracks like ‘Trumpet’s Lament’ are jazzier and the flugelhorn player Angelo Verploegen adopts a style like Benelux icon Bert Joris. The album goes a bit folkier in places as on ‘Joost’ which is a bit impenetrable although the mood is evocative. I would say everything on the record fits well into a grown up jazz supper club type environment where it’s the power of song as much as the skill of the singer that counts.

Bax is characterful and more importantly convincing. I suppose her voice which is more a jazz one than a show singer vessel lands in the contralto range and her huskiness suits the best track here. That’s the mood lifter jolly bossa ‘Michael’. It’s a piece that is subtitled to mean a “my dreamer” sentiment and is sung in Portuguese. I’d also pick out the Jeroen van Vliet solo piano performance ‘Jeroen’ at the end to make frequent return journeyings to.