Something Cool

There is a particular kind of loneliness that is almost elegant — not the loud, demanding kind, but the quiet sort that a woman carries into a bar on a Tuesday evening and sets down beside her like a coat. June Christy inhabits that loneliness completely here, her voice a cool, slightly smoky instrument that never once pleads or raises its pitch in desperation. The arrangement is spare and slightly drifting, the jazz accompaniment soft enough to feel like background at first, until you realize the emptiness between the notes is doing as much work as the notes themselves. This is a song about the story a woman constructs for herself — small, dignified, romantic in a faded way — and Christy's delivery makes you understand that she knows the story isn't quite true, and has decided to tell it anyway. That layered self-awareness, performed with such precision and poise, is what makes this record remarkable rather than merely sad. The West Coast cool jazz tradition she helped define valued understatement as an aesthetic principle, and here it becomes an emotional one too — the quieter the voice, the more it reveals. You would put this on in a nearly empty apartment, on a gray afternoon, when you are thinking about a version of your life that didn't quite materialize. It is not a defeated song, though. There is a kind of pride in its restraint, a woman deciding that even her sorrow will be beautiful.