Title: Trumpet Child
Artist: Over The Rhine
Back Porch Records

Over The Rhine's Linford Detweiler is as good at the almost-lost art of the album sleeve essay as he is at writing songs, and evokes (with some artistic license) the mood during the creation of this album, inspired as it is by New Orleans, jazz and old time American hymns:

"An evening of underground cabaret that began at 5pm and turned into an all-night affair, sleeves rolled up, it seems we seldom came up for air, a group of friends passing around musical instruments into the wee hours, the sound of our holy laughter and that familiar voice... the saxophones and clarinets blowing through these songs to mourn the still-ravaged streets of New Orleans, to resurrect the lost hymns of our childhood..."

Detweiler tells here and in the album notes for his hard-to-get solo jazz piano CD I Don't Think There's No Need to Bring Nothin' how his first memory was of a trumpet at a tent revival meeting, and how in the old hymns the sound of a trumpet would signal that "the world would be reborn". The spiritual and the cabaret are enmeshed in this album; there is a strange juxtaposition of images of the new Jerusalem and the sounds from the back doors of a jazz club, but of course it's all part of American musical history, and the album, where you could be forgiven for thinking that the original songs had been plucked from the back catalogue of American standards, conjures the spirit if not the letter of that history.

The first track has both a hymn-like melody (that seems reprised from one of the songs on Detweiler's solo album) and a jazz club sound. "I don't want to waste your time with music you don't need" is certainly a provocative line with which to be starting the album, but the song itself neatly ties together the threads that run through the album - the teasing, playfully romantic and the idea of music as a God-given essential, and life-giving.

The music is almost always simply a curtain parting for the arrival of Bergquist's voice, and on Trumpet Child she makes of the most of the "underground evening of lost midwestern cabaret", swinging and swooping, scraping and moaning, but also shifting gears, swapping hats, and playing dress-up. On Nothing Is Innocent she takes on the tentative and lazy drawl of Billie Holliday (or modern day equivalent Madeleine Peyroux), while on the countrified political joke-song If A Song Could Be President (sample line: "our best foreign policy would be based on harmony") she does a reasonable Emmylou Harris impersonation. Who'm I Kidding But Me, on the other hand, is a swaggering rush of words. Here her voice, in general, sounds more jovial than on Ohio or Drunkard's Prayer, but in whatever guise, it is one that grabs attention.

Taken in the context of their oeuvre, the album plays harder with the jazz elements of their sound, whereas the songs were generally more laid-back on the folky Drunkard's Prayer and Ohio. As such, more than dipping into the waters of the traditional American music, Trumpet Child has the feel of a rare, inspired party, where the things we can't do without - love, laughter, fine music - are celebrated.