"Who the heck is Christy Baron?" is a totally fair question to ask but a better question might be, "What the heck is Christy Baron?"
Baron is one of those artists I was happy to discover, quite accidentally, during the glory days of the iTunes Store when Apple was happy to sell you all the songs you could eat for just 99 cents apiece and albums for $9.99 — without constantly trying to push you into subscribing their semi-crippled music streaming service that doesn't even synchronize your playlists across devices.
But I digress.
Many years ago... honestly, I can't believe this was 2008 and VodkaPundit wasn't even close to new back then... I wrote a column about cover songs that might be as good or even better than the originals. There were two big points I wanted to make. The first was that everybody should just stop recording covers of The Beatles' "Yesterday" already. It's the most-covered song of all time, and nobody has brought anything new to it in probably 50 years. So knock it off.
The second is that "Spooky," made famous in 1968 by Classics IV, might be the most coverable rock song of all time. Originally an instrumental by saxophonist Mike Sharpe, Classics IV added the, well, classic lyric about that "spooky little girl like you," and it's since been covered in countless styles by countless acts.
Researching the column all those years ago, the iTunes Store teased me with Christy Baron's 2000 take on "Spooky." She's an actress/singer I'd never heard of, but you'd better believe I bought her album, "Steppin'," even before the 90-second preview of "Spooky" had finished playing.
Here's the song — stripped down by the arrangement and elevated by Baron's vocals to something unexpectedly sleek and sexy.
Baron has the vocal chops of a top-shelf torch singer but surprisingly broad tastes that extend from jazz to rock to pop to R&B.
You would never in a million years expect someone with her voice and appreciation for that languid jazz club sound to take on Billy Preston's "Will It Go 'Round In Circles," and yet here it is.
Even when Baron records a familiar standard like "The Shadow Of Your Smile," she makes it unmistakably her own.
A particular favorite of mine is Prince's "Thieves In The Temple."
I'm running out of space here, so I won't include the videos for Baron's versions of Peter Gabriel's "Mercy Street" or Santana's "She's Not There," but it pains me dearly.
So let me finish by getting back to that question I asked at the start of this column: What the heck is Christy Baron?
Her phrasing is pure jazz. Her voice is smoke and bourbon. Her taste is completely modern but always with a respectful look back at the classics. And her arrangements dance inside the Venn overlap where jazz, soul, and world music all meet.
So I honestly couldn't tell you what the hell Christy Baron is. I just know that I'm a fan of "Steppin'" and all her other albums.
"Steppin'" is available for streaming in CD-quality lossless on Apple Music and in a bandwidth-friendly compressed format on Spotify.
