Raya Yarbrough is clearly inspired by the hybrid musical personality of Cassandra Wilson, who spent the better part of twenty years exploring alternative repertoire to the standard fare, mining such sources as Sting, The Band, and even the Monkees. Wilson injected her work on these songs with healthy doses of the blues and roots American music, so that she always brought a new depth to popular music, something jazz musicians have always done.

Yarbrough, an LA-based singer and songwriter, is attuned to all kinds of music, from early blues and jazz to more modern sounds, including reggae and chill out electronic, and she is able to blend them in ways that display her talent as a singer while keeping her sound fresh and relevant. She opens with guitar-backed blues on “Lord Knows I Would,” a tune that demonstrates the genre-bending sound of her backing group, which includes guitarist Takeshi Akimoto, pianist John Kirby, bassist Kaveh Rastegar, and drummer Nate Wood. Besides vocals, Yarbrough also plays acoustic guitar and some piano on this disc. Things widen a bit sonically on the reggae-tinged “You’re So Bad For Me” as Kirby provides a funky clavinet that melds rhythmically with Akimoto’s guitar work.

The musical vistas continue to widen on a languid, electronic-influenced version of Clifford Brown’s “Joy Spring.” "Though of course I'm a fan of jazz, I'm also into a few electronic artists who work with manipulated sounds,” explains Yarbrough. "I was aiming for that effect on this song. I wanted to do something really outside the box with this classic bebop tune." She succeeds very admirably, making one listen to this tune in a completely new way. Similarly, she takes Queen’s song “Dreamer’s Ball” and takes it through American musical history, backing off the campy element present in the group’s original recording. There’s early jazz, gospel, blues, show tunes, all mixed in there, and vocally she sells the song and its stylistic conceit in completely believable fashion.

Yarbrough has an advantage in the fact that she is a truly interesting songwriter as well as a consummate vocalist and musician (all but one of the arrangements on this disc are hers), and she shows it with standout songs such as “Sorrow’s Eyes,” “Listen Emily,” and the wicked “Vice and Vanity.” All of these songs are lyrically interesting and have gorgeous melodic components, something all too frequently missing from today’s popular music scene. On the other hand, she never approaches a standard without seriously considering her approach, as heard here on “Mood Indigo” and the Johnny Mercer/Woody Herman tune “Early Autumn.”

Ultimately it’s this mix of the classic and the modern, performed with complete sincerity and a lack of condescension toward either, that makes Yarbrough’s disc so incredibly fresh and fascinating. In a sea of releases by female singers, Raya Yarbrough’s stands out as one that will be listened to well past this calendar year.