On her new album Natural Impression, acclaimed international singer Mafalda Minnozzi offers up the latest chapter in a longstanding collaboration with American guitarist, arranger, and producer Paul Ricci. In a richly varied set of music, Minnozzi displays her deep affinity for Bossa nova, French chanson, Italian standards, American jazz and other flavors of global song. Hers is a skillful balance between the virtuosity and eclecticism of jazz with the cosmopolitan sensibility of world music. Her style recalls ancestral links with Italian melodrama and French cabaret in a stylistic blend that uses the voice in the manner of a skilled instrumentalist — shown, for example, by her nimble unisons with Beavers’ trombone on “Mas Que Nada”, or with Ricci’s guitar on their boppish rendering of the Leny Andrade-associated showpiece “Estamos Aí” as well as the seductive dance with Don Byron on “Ne Me Quitte Pas”. The songwriters on Natural Impression — Antonio Carlos Jobim, Ivan Lins, Luiz Bonfá, Jacques Brel, Caetano Veloso, Jorge Ben, João Bosco, Lucio Battisti, Roberto Menescal and more — offer priceless material for Minnozzi, and she commits to it body and soul. The “house” band couldn’t be more solid, supportive and freshly inventive.