| Jazz |
Summary: Daphne Roubini’s Whisky Scented Kisses reimagines classic jazz with an uncanny, cinematic twist, blending vintage phrasing, modern experimentation, and a quietly captivating voice.
Daphne Roubini’s Whisky Scented Kisses: A Strange, Seductive Reinvention of Jazz
In an era where much of contemporary jazz vocalism leans toward polish, revivalism, or conceptual framing, Daphne Roubini arrives with something stranger, less easily categorized, and ultimately more intriguing. Her album Whisky Scented Kisses does not simply revisit the past; it bends it, refracts it, and occasionally unsettles it.
Her artistic universe recalls the off-kilter sensibility of Tim Burton, where the familiar is rendered just slightly uncanny. Jazz tradition is present, unmistakably so, but it is filtered through a fractured, post-contemporary lens. Melodies seem to emerge from shadow rather than structure; phrasing stretches and contracts in unexpected ways. The result is an experience that catches the listener off guard, disarming, at times disorienting, and often quietly seductive.
There is a particular pleasure in this kind of deconstruction. Roubini’s approach resists linearity, favoring instead a form of musical storytelling that unfolds in fragments and gestures. The album slips by almost unnoticed at first. Her voice, occasionally tinged with something nearly childlike, floats above a carefully constructed musical architecture. That contrast is central: innocence set against precision, fragility against control. Around her, the musicians demonstrate a finely tuned awareness, shaping the space with understated arrangements and subtle shifts that feel less like accompaniment and more like co-conspiracy.
Still, this is not an album that yields easily. Listeners who gravitate toward the clarity and emotional directness of classic jazz singers may find themselves held at a distance. At times, the very qualities that make the record compelling, its asymmetry, its hesitations, its refusal to resolve cleanly, also risk creating a sense of detachment. A few passages feel more intellectually intriguing than emotionally immediate, as though the atmosphere takes precedence over connection.
Yet for those willing to inhabit its peculiar logic, the rewards are considerable. Drawing on the phrasing and harmonic sensibilities of 1940s and 1950s vocal jazz, Whisky Scented Kisses blends original compositions with carefully chosen standards. The effect is not nostalgic but refracted: echoes of the past, reshaped into something that feels at once intimate and elusive.
At the center stands Roubini’s voice, anchored in the language of classic jazz yet guided by an intuitive sense of space and timing that allows silence and hesitation to carry as much meaning as sound. She moves through themes of love in its many forms, nostalgia, desire, independence, risk, with a restraint that often proves more powerful than overt expression.
A native of Vancouver, she seems to have absorbed not only musical influences but also something of a broader artistic vocabulary. One senses the imprint of literature and cinema throughout the album’s atmosphere. Recorded at the Warehouse Studio of Bryan Adams, the project brings together a sextet whose innate sense of swing provides a subtle but steady grounding. The elegant voicings and brass arrangements of guitarist Paul Pigat shape the ensemble’s sonic identity, while the interplay between voice and horns creates a layered harmonic resonance, at once evocative of mid-century jazz and unmistakably contemporary.
The album ultimately opens onto a larger question: what defines a jazz vocalist today? Increasingly, artists persuade through narrative, concept, or lyrical framing. Roubini, by contrast, convinces through atmosphere, through a carefully sustained sense of displacement. It is a quality that recalls the dreamlike unease of David Lynch, where meaning is felt as much as understood.
There are moments, too, that evoke the quiet, melancholic drift of Lulu on the Bridge, a world where romance and fragmentation coexist, where beauty emerges not in clarity but in ambiguity. Roubini’s album inhabits a similar space. It does not insist. It lingers.
And in that lingering, it finds its voice.
Thierry De Clemensat
Member at Jazz Journalists Association
USA correspondent for Paris-Move and ABS magazine
Editor in chief – Bayou Blue Radio, Bayou Blue News
PARIS-MOVE, March 18th 2026
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Musicians :
Daphne Roubini: Vocals, band leader, composer
Paul Pigat: Guitar, arranger, composer
Stephen Nikleva: Guitar, composer
Dave Say: Saxophone
Brad Turner: Flugel Horn, Trumpet
Jeremy Holmes: Bass
Track Listing :
Minor Mood
Am I Crazy?
Whisky Scented Kisses
How Do I Know?
Today
There’s Always Tomorrow
You Leave Me Breathless
This Year’s Kisses
Who Stole The Moon?
Executive Producer: Daphne Roubini & Cory Weeds
Produced by Daphne Roubini
Recorded at The Warehouse Studios on April 3, 2025
Engineered by Sheldon Zaharko
Mixed and Mastered by Sheldon Zaharko
Production Manager: Dominic Duchamp
Front Cover Photo: Adam Blasberg
Back cover (band photo): James Vincent Agregado