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Rebecca Sanborn first performed the songs that would become her new album, Shadow Work, at the Montavilla Jazz Festival in 2021. Singing without an instrument—a rarity for the pianist, who is a mainstay of the Portland jazz scene—she entrusted the music to a tight trio featuring her husband, Ji Tanzer, on drums alongside bassist Jon Shaw and pianist Randy Porter.
“That was kind of terrifying for me,” Sanborn says. “I always have a stack of keyboards or a guitar or something.”
Douglas Detrick, artistic director of the Portland Jazz Composers Ensemble, was in the audience and reached out after the show asking to arrange the songs for his much larger ensemble. Sanborn performed the songs with the PJCE at the following year’s festival, and members of that group back her up on the Shadow Work recording, which is out now through PJCE’s record label.
Given the ambition and scale of the eight songs in the 50-minute cycle, the album’s long gestation should come as little surprise. Originating from late-night songwriting sessions at the piano after putting her young daughter to bed, Shadow Work has swelled over the past five years into a mammoth undertaking that required no less than three local arts grants—from the Regional Arts & Culture Council, the Echo Fund and the Holler Fund—to realize. For her performance at this year’s Montavilla Jazz Festival, to concur with the release of the album, she was backed by an 18-musician ensemble featuring most of the players on the recording.
For budget reasons, she had to skip the string section. “It was kind of heartbreaking,” Sanborn says, “but that’s OK.”
The Portland-born composer’s only other solo album, Ballads & Namesakes, came out 20 years ago. “I have a love-hate relationship with it, as all artists do with their recorded material,” she says. “My voice is so soft and gentle and honestly out of tune, and I’m like, Oh, little Becca!”
The intervening decades have been full of other projects. Sanborn has played piano in the local jazz band Blue Cranes since 2004. She and Tanzer founded the indie-rock band Swansea in 2011, and the couple plays together in Loch Lomond, the indie-folk project of veteran Portland songwriter Ritchie Young. Sanborn’s fourth active project is Echo Echo Echo, the all-female synth trio she plays in alongside The Decemberists’ Jenny Conlee and fellow Swansea member Kyleen King.
Sanborn isn’t shy about her influences: she describes Ballads & Namesakes as her attempt at a “soft, Norah Jones-y vibe,” and says the electronic-forward approach of Swansea was inspired by artists like My Brightest Diamond and LCD Soundsystem. To break out of the small sound of her first solo album, Sanborn studied with local R&B singer and vocal coach Valerie Day, who she says encouraged her to “pinpoint singers who could do things I couldn’t do,” like the alt-country powerhouse Neko Case.
“I was like, ‘Damn it, how is she doing this in her lower register?’” Sanborn says. “I worked really hard on that, and I extended my range significantly.”
On Shadow Work, Sanborn’s voice is more than a match for the arrangements. “Cutting the Path” and the swaggering, horn-assisted “Chariot” contain sections Sanborn wrote before she could sing them properly.
“If I wanted to sound really big, then I would write it a whole step or sometimes a couple whole steps higher than I was able to sing,” she says. “And then I would have to work really hard to get those notes to be able to perform them.”
It’s dense, maximalist music, but it’s not nearly as challenging for the listener as it is for the performer. “Cutting the Path” suggests what a ’90s balladeer-badass like Tori Amos or Fiona Apple might make when paired with the all-star London jazz backing band on Bowie’s Blackstar. On “The Big Room,” Sanborn’s voice squirrels up the branching beats in a way that brings to mind the great jazz vocal improviser Betty Carter.
There’s a lot going on in any given song, but they never feel overstuffed or overwhelming. Working with producer Todd Sickafoose in Eugene, Sanborn took a “reductive” approach to mixing, stripping, for example, around “60 to 65%” of the original instrumental tracks on album opener “Minotaur.”
Having already strained her budget for the most recent performance, Sanborn finds it unlikely that Shadow Work will be performed live again in the near future. “We’ll have to see,” she says. “Afterward we were celebrating and were like, ‘Yay, we did it; it’ll never happen again.’ And Douglas”—Detrick, the guy who first asked to expand the songs in 2021—“was like, ‘Well, I have some thoughts on that.’”
LISTEN: Shadow Work by Rebecca Sanborn on PJCE Records, pjce.bandcamp.com/album/shadow-work. Digital album $10, vinyl $30.
