A LITTLE WHISKY, A LOT OF SPACE

Daphne Roubini makes restraint
the defining virtue of a quietly
distinctive jazz album

Daphne Roubini (Adam Blasberg)

Start with the credits. Voice, two guitars, bass, tenor, trumpet. Nobody keeping time.

Most singers would fall straight through that hole. Daphne Roubini builds on it. Her voice is small and sits high, and with no drummer marking the beat she can place a phrase wherever the lyric needs it. She arrives late. She lets consonants go soft at the ends of lines, so a lyric about wanting someone starts to sound more guarded than romantic. Blossom Dearie is the obvious reference for the tone, unforced and set well above the staff. What she does with time comes from Billie Holiday. On “Am I Crazy?” Brad Turner answers her with a trumpet line so thin it could pass for room tone, and the question resolves in the way she lets go of the final syllable.

Daphne Roubini and Black Gardenia (James Vincent Agregado)

The band is Canadian top to bottom: Paul Pigat and Stephen Nikleva on guitars, Jeremy Holmes on bass, Dave Say on tenor, Turner on trumpet and flugelhorn. Washington has now tariffed Canadian steel, aluminum, and softwood lumber. Jazz singers still cross duty-free, which means either somebody at Commerce has taste or nobody has gotten to that line item. Bet on the latter.

Take the drums out and the bass becomes the floor. On “How Do I Know,” a song holding hope and doubt in the same breath, Holmes lays down a pulse steady enough for Roubini to hover above it as long as she wants. Turner drops in a single interjection that adds color without trying to own the room. Between them, they do most of what a rhythm section is supposed to do without actually having one. It sounds like a bad idea. For nine tracks, it works.

Daphney Roubini (Kasia Idzkowska)

Six of those are Roubini’s. “Minor Mood” opens at a crawl, Pigat’s voicings spare enough that Turner can answer without raising his voice. The title track is her best writing here. Whisky breath in a dark room reads badly on paper, and she gets away with it by refusing to sell the image too hard. She holds back where another singer might lean in. Pigat frames the horns with a sway rather than a groove, and that choice runs through the album. His arrangements never crowd her. That kind of restraint is harder than it sounds.

Then there is “There’s Always Tomorrow,” by Mimi Marlowe Jaffe, unpublished and unrecorded until this session at Bryan Adams’ Warehouse Studio in Vancouver. Roubini stretches the lines until they sag, which suits a lyric about the distance between who you were and who you turned out to be. She has exactly the song her voice needs. It is the finest thing on the record.

Daphney Roubini (Robyn Ardagh)

The standards give her more room to move. “This Year’s Kisses,” which Holiday cut with Teddy Wilson in January 1937, takes a tempo nothing else here risks, and Say’s tenor bites down hard enough to change the weather. “You Leave Me Breathless,” the Ralph Freed and Friedrich Hollaender song from 1938, gets a lift she mostly avoids elsewhere. Berlin and Hollaender each wrote melodies with somewhere to go, so she can hold back and the songs still travel. Her own tunes live in a tighter range. By the sixth track, you have to listen harder than you should to tell some of them apart.

She closes with “Who Stole the Moon?” at tempo, and suddenly out comes a storyteller’s snap she has been holding back since the first bar. A vintage romance, a promise, a parting at dawn. She sounds like a woman reporting what happened, and the band catches it within four bars and follows her.

Eight tracks of subtraction, then she gives one thing back. Only then do you realize how much she had been withholding.

✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦

Whisky Scented Kisses
Daphne Roubini and Black Gardenia
Cellar Live
released April 3, 2026
for more information, visit Black Gardenia

✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦