• 1: Your Heart Is As Black As Night (3:27)
• 2: Catch 22 (4:46)
• 3: Red Velvet Rope (4:18)
• 4: Over and Done (3:55)
• 5: The Boy That Lived There (3:47)
• 6: Sixteen (3:34)
• 7: The Flea Markets of Paris (3:59)
• 8: Holding Back Tears (4:26)
• 9: Boogie Street (6:16)

Since releasing her captivating debut, 2009’s Dangerous Liaisons, jazz vocalist Sylvia Brooks has demonstrated a knack for inhabiting distinct personas, with a specialty in film-noir inspired femme fatales. On her fourth album, Signature, she takes on the most challenging role yet, defining herself through a set of beautifully crafted original songs. Her evocative lyrics and emotionally direct delivery lend the music hard-won authenticity. Whether looking back with wry affection on her walk-on-the-wild-side youth or lamenting a lost love, Brooks brings bracing honesty and poise to the material. As on 2017’s The Arrangement, she’s surrounded by the Southland’s most creative accompanists: drummer Ray Brinker and bassist Trey Henry on nearly every track, with ace pianists Tom Ranier, Jeff Colella, and Christian Jacob providing beguiling, harmonically rich settings for her incisive lyrics. The cautionary tale “Red Velvet Rope” is set to a sensuous Latin groove by cuatro master Kiki Valera, scion of a legendary Cuban musical clan, and aside from that Afro-Cuban jaunt, the album sways through swingtown—from the witty “Catch 22” to the passionately romantic “The Flea Markets of Paris.” The two songs she covers, Melody Gardot’s bluesy, organ-driven “Your Heart Is as Black as Night” and the Leonard Cohen/Sharon Robinson erotic lament “Boogie Street,” seem to raise the temperature of her own work. Signature isn’t Brooks’s maiden voyage as a songwriter; she included three strong originals on The Arrangement, but this album marks a quantum leap reflecting years of concentrated effort. “I really worked hard on trying to make the stories deeper and richer,” she says. “Each song is really a story within itself.”