With All That I Am

Songwriter, musician, and arranger Carol Duboc has penned songs for a variety of pop and R&B artists, ranging from Patti LaBelle to the Fine Young Cannibals to Tom Jones. On her debut album, With All That I Am, Duboc turns to jazz, the music that she loved as a child growing up in Kansas City. Duboc was educated at the University of Southern California in vocal performance, composition, and music engineering, and her experience in each of those areas is evident on this album. Her voice, which makes the most of her solid technique, never really accomplishes more than a dozen other jazz vocalists could, but while those other vocalists would prove their abilities singing standards, Duboc has crafted an album of original songs that manage to sound like standards themselves. With a pleasant infusion of Brazilian and Latin jazz styles, this album is one very well-balanced, pleasant concoction that seems on the surface to be fairly simple, yet never sounds thin or insubstantial.