Melody Gardot in concert she's in Seattle 6/19

Regarding Stewie's info on the lineup, I believe the sax player was actually Irwin Hall, who joined the band in October 2009 during its tour of Japan. He and Charles Staab graduated from Princeton in 2007, which would make them both 25 -- the same age as Melody herself. Hall is also a sideman on Charnett Moffett's 2010 release, 'Treasure', and speaks fluent Japanese.

About their mentor at Princeton, Anthony Branker:
http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S16/67/20S19/
(..and the comment on http://www.allaboutjazz.com/php/article.php?id=34535)

Anthony Ware is indeed a talented young sax player (now 26) who performed with Irwin Hall while they were in college; Ware was a student at Rutgers. He joined Hall and the band for Melody Gardot's appearance with the New York Pops on June 1 at SummerStage in Central Park, NYC. Here is a video of them performing together at another outdoor event in New York, a May 2009 tribute to Max Roach: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8-CTj2Bb-M

The outdoor concert (tribute to Max Roach) mentioned above actually happened in 2008, when Hall and Ware were 22 or 23. There are two videos (parts 1 and 2):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8-CTj2Bb-M
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0VegSkb4xGo

A bit of their performance together at Melody Gardot's June 1 SummerStage concert is captured in this video (her song 'Our Love is Easy'):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NTG0LFvz0LU

Another extremely promising graduate (in 2008) of Branker's program is Julia Brav, who has been studying with Joanne Brackeen for several years.

See this performance of a quartet she is part of.

I find the upcoming young jazz players now in their mid-twenties to be incredibly inspiring. Other examples include the members of Gerald Clayton's trio, bassist Linda Oh, the Le Boeuf brothers, Pascal and Remy, pianists Aaron Parks and Taylor Eigsti, and drummer Ted Poor (a recent Eastman graduate). There are many more.

See the review here.

It's not a particularly good one, but it confirms that Irwin Hall was the sax player that night.

From Stewie:

Twelve or fifteen songs from her two releases, most of which were done in a completely different style from the albums, and a band--drummer, bass, and a sax/flute player--with an astonishing range.

If you haven't seen the following two videos before, you really should see them now. The supporting players, again, are two young musicians in their twenties, from the U.K. and Germany (I think), who have also joined Melody on several of her spring 2010 dates.

"Get Out Of Town" and "I Love Paris" at Olympia (Paris)
"La Chanson des Vieux Amants" (Jacques Brel) at Olympia (Paris)

In April she also did a somewhat different arrangement of Cole Porter's 'Get Out of Town' for a BBC Four Sessions program in London, accompanied by a guitarist and Irwin Hall on sax. This performance was on YouTube for a while, but has since been removed.

Perhaps some of these covers will appear on her next album, on which she has apparently begun working (according to a couple of her posts on Twitter).

See this article, currently online at Elle.com (but probably not for long). It dwells much more on the accident and its consequences, and her rather mysterious history prior to it, than the music. That said, it is quite well-written and seems to be more carefully researched than usual.

(Note: "Melody Gardot" turns out to be an adopted name.)

Having read Andrew Goldman's article, I can't help but wonder about another alleged fact, that she was born on February 2, which is also Eva Cassidy's birthday. (See Wikipedia.) I don't mean to be cynical by saying that. One gets the sense she is very much in the throes of constructing an identity, because of her age (isn't that what one's teens and 20s are about anyway?), the after-effects of her accident, and the process of unfolding her talent and discovering where it might take her.

I've read quite a lot about the development of young musicians recently, especially jazz musicians, and finding the balance between audacity and humility—with a capacity to listen deeply to other musicians—is central to the process. Some pretense and role-playing is also probably unavoidable for most, especially if one is trying to escape certain constraints and inhibitions of one's background.

NOBODY can doubt her courage.

(PS: In this connection, see this AAJ interview with saxophonist Myron Walden.)

As an example of what bothers and intrigues me at the same time, see this video taken by an audience member during the June 29 performance in Athens (start of the summer tour of Europe).

Melody starts with a brief quote from 'Don't Explain' (Billie Holiday / Arthur Herzog), and then launches into a radical re-interpretation of her own 'Love Me Like a River Does' (from 'Worrisome Heart'). The original is so perfect that I can hardly stand the thought of it being tampered with, so my initial response was dismay. That feeling didn't completely dissipate, but I couldn't help but be drawn in by what the band does with it. (By now I've played the video several times.) The young German jazz cellist Stephan Braun has been part of many of her European dates this year, and his playing is at the core of this arrangement. Melody's own contribution on piano is also interesting.

I think many fans—especially in the U.S.—of the two released albums may be nonplussed by the direction she is taking now, but that is inevitable. She is just too talented a musician, her artistic interests are too broad, and her range of experience is expanding too quickly, to be constrained by those early expectations and assumptions. European audiences will probably find it easier to keep up with her evolution.