La Reserve

Three years ago, 23-year-old singer Lucía was a finalist at the prestigious Sarah Vaughan International Jazz Vocal Competition – and the first Mexican artist to enter the contest. For the final round, she picked a standard that reflected her musical sensibility, colored in equal parts by the beauty of jazz and the Latin American songbook – a mash-up of “What a Difference a Day Makes” with its initial incarnation as a bolero in Spanish written in Spanish by María Grever. Lucía won the competition. “What a Difference a Day Makes” is now the opening cut of the self-titled Lucía, an exquisite debut album that showcases the luminous qualities of her voice, and her superb technique and versatility. From her velvety reading of McCoy Tyner and Sammy Cahn’s “You Taught My Heart To Sing” and an achingly vulnerable cover of Olivia Rodrigo’s “Lacy” to a mournful “Alfonsina y el Mar” and a version of “Veracruz” that brims with Lucía’s Mexican pride, the Matt Pierson-produced album finds the emerging singer surrounded by a cadre of jazz virtuosos: Venezuelan pianist Edward Simon, American double-bassist Larry Grenadier, Mexican drummer Antonio Sánchez, and Puerto Rican saxophonist David Sánchez.