Fay Victor

It’s rare in jazz for a singer to serve as anything other than the spotlit centerpiece, but Fay Victor is an unusually generous bandleader. That diplomacy allows the New York native to stretch her warm alto around elongated figures and conceptual compositions on last year’s The FreeSong Suite, a fearless foray stringing together several motifs into one stream-of-consciousness whole. Swedish-born guitarist Anders Nilsson plucks spidery figures and dissonant clusters that loom like an overcast sky, fading to reveal Victor’s cunning artistic vision.

At the outset of Victor’s career, the downtown NYC scene served as her playground while she moved through the standards circuit. Since an extended Dutch detour in 2003, the singer’s been drawn to the European free-improv tradition, steeping herself in its abstract aesthetic while retaining the full-bodied tone honed when interpreting the Great American Songbook.

The Brooklynite’s elastic croon has a complex character, imbued with hints of blues, stretching consonants and sustaining vowels. Traditional parameters like a time signature are eschewed in favor of a freewheeling, captivating flight. Victor passionately throws herself into the fray of the gritty, metallic “Joe’s Car” and virtually speaks in tongues on “Stemming,” shifting tone rather than overindulging in showy melismatic acrobatics. It’s easy to hear traces of the extraterrestrial scat of Betty Carter or the soulful growl of Sarah Vaughan.

This week, Victor and Nilsson play from FreeSong and preview cuts from Bare, their forthcoming album as the ExPosed Blues Duo. Subbing for the Fay Victor Ensemble’s rhythm section are two local Vandermark 5 sidemen: drummer Tim Daisy (Thu 8) and cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm (Fri 9). Though Victor’s the out-of-towner, she’s sure to make them feel right at home in her lyrical labyrinth.

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