Venus – The Amazing Super Audio CD Sampler Vol. 13: Seventeen Voices in the After-Hours World of Jazz

The room is nearly dark when the first voice appears.

Alexis Cole begins “My Heart Belongs to Daddy” with the confidence of a singer who understands that a Cole Porter song is never as innocent as its melody initially suggests. Behind the playful title lies a sophisticated mixture of flirtation, theatre and emotional calculation. Cole enters that world without turning the performance into a period piece. Her voice brings the song closer, transforming Broadway wit into the opening scene of an intimate late-night jazz programme.

This is the entrance to Venus – The Amazing Super Audio CD Sampler Vol. 13, an expansive collection devoted to the women of the Venus Records catalogue. Released in Japan on March 16, 2016, under catalogue number VHGD-138, the album carries the subtitle Venus Great Lady Vocals and presents 17 performances across almost 89 minutes. The Japanese edition was issued as a stereo single-layer SACD, requiring an SACD-compatible player rather than a conventional CD-only machine. (venusrecord.com)

The title may describe the singers collectively, but the album’s real achievement lies in how strongly it preserves their differences.

These are not 17 interchangeable interpretations of the Great American Songbook. Each vocalist enters with her own relationship to melody, rhythm, language and silence. Some performances are polished and romantic. Others are smoky, wounded, playful or quietly defiant. The accompanying musicians may provide piano, bass, drums and occasional horn colours, but the narrative belongs to the voices.

Vol. 13 unfolds like a sequence of encounters in an after-hours jazz club. One singer delivers a confession from the centre of the stage. Another appears to speak almost privately from the edge of the room. A Broadway standard becomes an adult secret, a Brazilian melody becomes an atmosphere, and a song of romantic disappointment acquires an unexpected sense of independence.

After Alexis Cole’s elegant opening, Nicki Parrott enters with “Black Coffee.”

The emotional temperature changes immediately. Where “My Heart Belongs to Daddy” carries theatrical wit, “Black Coffee” belongs to sleeplessness. The song lives in the hours when the conversation has ended but the mind refuses to become quiet. Its title suggests an ordinary cup on a table, yet generations of jazz singers have understood that the coffee is only a symbol for waiting, loneliness and emotional exhaustion.

Parrott is particularly well suited to that intimate world. As both a vocalist and bassist, she approaches a song with an instinctive sense of time. A phrase does not simply sit above the rhythm section; it settles into the pulse. The effect is controlled rather than dramatic, which allows the melancholy to emerge without being forced.

The contrast between the first two performances establishes the album’s central idea. Venus Great Lady Vocals is not organised around one mood. It moves through many versions of desire: playful desire, disappointed desire, secret desire, remembered desire and the determination to move beyond it.

Sally Night makes that need explicit with “I Wanna Be Loved.”

The title sounds simple, but the performance exists in the space between declaration and vulnerability. To say that one wants to be loved is also to admit that something is missing. Night allows the melody to retain its classic elegance while giving the words an emotional immediacy. The performance feels less like a nostalgic recreation of vintage vocal jazz than a direct statement delivered in the present tense.

Then Simone Kopmajer, credited on the album as Simone, takes the programme into the shadows with “We Kiss in a Shadow.”

Written by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II for The King and I, the song tells of affection forced into secrecy. On this recording, the arrangement includes pianist John Di Martino, bassist George Mraz, drummer Tim Horner and tenor saxophonist Eric Alexander, placing Simone’s voice inside a rich New York jazz setting. (MusicBrainz)

The melody is romantic, but the emotional world is uneasy. A kiss hidden from view is more than a tender moment; it carries the pressure of everything that cannot be openly acknowledged. Simone’s performance allows the song’s restraint to become its strength. The voice does not need to break apart to communicate longing. The tension is already present in what remains controlled.

By the fourth track, The Amazing Super Audio CD Sampler Vol. 13 has moved from sophisticated flirtation to nocturnal loneliness, from the desire to be loved to the danger of love that must remain concealed. The sequence feels less like a collection of unrelated standards than a developing story.

Laird Jackson changes the pace with “Traveling Light.”

The title suggests movement without baggage, but it can also imply the deliberate abandonment of emotional weight. Jackson’s performance brings a cooler kind of freedom into the programme. After the secrecy of “We Kiss in a Shadow,” “Traveling Light” sounds like someone deciding that departure may be healthier than waiting.

The arrangement leaves room for the words to move naturally. This is not escape presented as triumph. It is a quieter form of independence, shaped by the knowledge that every journey requires leaving something behind.

That idea of memory and consequence continues with Adela Dalto singing “The Days of Wine and Roses.”

Henry Mancini and Johnny Mercer’s song is often remembered for its beautiful melody, but beneath the elegance lies a darker story about pleasure, passing time and loss. Dalto does not need to underline every tragic implication. The composition carries its own sadness. Her task is to inhabit it.

The official Venus track sequence places Dalto directly before Tessa Souter, allowing two very different forms of sophisticated vocal jazz to meet in the centre of the album. (venusrecord.com)

Souter performs “The Lamp Is Low,” a song whose melodic roots draw upon Maurice Ravel. The familiar theme becomes a nocturnal jazz ballad, suspended between classical refinement and intimate vocal storytelling. The lamp of the title is more than part of the room. It creates the conditions for confession: reduced light, lowered voices and the feeling that the outside world has temporarily disappeared.

Souter’s performance fits naturally into the Venus Records aesthetic. The voice appears close, while the musicians create a surrounding space rather than a decorative background. The piano does not merely provide chords; it shapes the atmosphere. Bass and drums establish a pulse that feels almost private.

For audiophile listeners, this kind of performance reveals why female jazz vocals have long been central to high-end audio demonstrations. A revealing system must reproduce more than pitch. It must preserve breath, texture, consonants, the physical distance between singer and microphone, and the acoustic relationship between the voice and the accompanying instruments.

Yet Vol. 13 does not reduce its singers to test signals. The recording quality matters because the human differences matter.

Barbara Carroll’s “But Beautiful” offers one of the clearest examples.

Carroll was both a pianist and vocalist, and that dual identity gives her interpretation a special sense of structure. She understands the song from inside its harmony. The voice and piano do not seem like separate elements competing for attention; they emerge from the same musical thought.

“But Beautiful” is built around contradiction. Love can be tearful or cheerful, a problem or a pleasure, but still beautiful. Carroll treats that ambiguity as the heart of the song. The performance does not try to solve the contradiction. It simply allows both sides to exist.

After the emotional complexity of Carroll’s interpretation, Laura Ann introduces the soft Brazilian atmosphere of “Gentle Rain.”

Written by Luiz Bonfá with lyrics by Matt Dubey, the composition replaces the hard edges of heartbreak with something more fluid. Rain can suggest sadness, but gentle rain also brings quiet, renewal and intimacy. Laura Ann’s performance creates a moment of calm in the album’s unfolding narrative. (MusicBrainz)

The rhythm moves lightly beneath the melody. Nothing needs to be hurried. The song seems to arrive through the air rather than announce itself from the stage.

This is another moment where the extended SACD format serves the music. With 17 tracks and a total running time of 1 hour, 28 minutes and 58 seconds, the album has enough space to create gradual emotional transitions rather than compressing its singers into a short commercial sampler. (MusicBrainz)

Then Nicole Henry begins “Cry Me a River,” and the atmosphere hardens.

Arthur Hamilton’s standard has become one of the defining songs of romantic retaliation. It is not simply about sadness. It is about the moment when sadness becomes strength. The person who once caused the pain has returned too late, and the singer is no longer willing to offer easy forgiveness.

Henry brings dramatic authority to the song without losing control of its jazz character. The title phrase can be delivered as accusation, dismissal or bitter humour, and the performance gains power from moving among those emotional possibilities.

Placed after “Gentle Rain,” “Cry Me a River” creates one of the album’s sharpest transitions. The rain of the previous track was soft and atmospheric. Now the water has become a river of regret, and the singer refuses to be the one drowning in it.

Champian Fulton follows with “When Your Lover Has Gone.”

Fulton is also a pianist and singer, and her interpretation brings the directness of a working jazz musician to the standard. The song does not ask what happens when love begins. It asks what remains after love has left.

The answer is found in the rhythm of the performance. Even when the lyrics describe loss, the music continues to move. That movement is essential to jazz. The singer may be alone within the story, but she is not musically isolated. Piano, bass and drums respond, support and occasionally challenge her.

The track becomes less a portrait of defeat than an illustration of how sorrow can be shaped into swing.

Then Cyrille Aimée enters with “Tea for Two,” and suddenly the room feels lighter.

The Vincent Youmans standard is one of the oldest songs on the programme, but Aimée’s rhythmic imagination prevents it from sounding preserved behind glass. The melody carries the memory of Broadway and traditional jazz, while her phrasing introduces a more contemporary sense of freedom.

“Tea for Two” imagines a private domestic world built for a couple. In the context of Vol. 13, however, that simple fantasy arrives after songs of secrecy, departure, regret and abandonment. The innocence now feels knowingly temporary.

Aimée brings playfulness back to the album, but it is not naïve playfulness. It sounds like someone aware of the risks of romance and still willing to enjoy the invitation.

The mood turns reverent with Anna Kolchina’s interpretation of “I Remember Clifford.”

Benny Golson composed the piece in memory of trumpeter Clifford Brown, and Jon Hendricks later added lyrics. On this compilation, the song stands apart from the romantic narratives surrounding it. The loss is not the end of an affair but the absence of a musician whose life and art continue to resonate. The official album credits Golson and Hendricks for the composition and lyrics. (venusrecord.com)

Kolchina approaches the melody as remembrance rather than display. The performance asks the listener to slow down. A song like “I Remember Clifford” cannot be rushed without losing its meaning. Its emotional force comes from dignity.

The placement of the track is significant. After the light rhythmic lift of “Tea for Two,” memory returns with greater depth. Vol. 13 repeatedly refuses to remain comfortable for long. Every moment of ease is followed by another emotional question.

Roseanna Vitro continues the reflective mood with “My Foolish Heart.”

The Victor Young and Ned Washington standard addresses the dangerous point at which romantic feeling begins to overcome judgement. The heart is described as foolish because it continues toward something the mind already recognises as risky.

Vitro gives the song emotional weight without turning it into a fragile whisper. Her voice brings experience to the warning. This is not someone discovering romantic danger for the first time. It sounds like someone who knows the consequences and remains vulnerable to them anyway.

The recording has its own deep Venus Records history. MusicBrainz credits Eddie Higgins on piano, Ray Drummond on bass and Ben Riley on drums for the underlying session, recorded in New York in October 1998, with Tetsuo Hara and Todd Barkan among the producers associated with the performance. (MusicBrainz)

That personnel gives the track the feeling of a classic jazz encounter. Higgins’ elegance, Drummond’s grounded bass and Riley’s subtle rhythmic authority provide a setting in which Vitro can move freely without losing the song’s structure.

Marilyn Scott then sings Irving Berlin’s “I Got Lost in His Arms.”

The title suggests surrender, but Scott’s delivery gives that surrender an adult awareness. The song originally comes from Annie Get Your Gun, yet here it leaves the theatre behind and enters the closer world of vocal jazz. (MusicBrainz)

To become lost in someone’s arms can sound romantic, comforting or dangerous depending on the voice telling the story. Scott allows those possibilities to remain open. The arrangement does not need grand orchestration. A smaller jazz setting makes the emotional moment feel more immediate.

By this stage, the album has traced an entire cycle of attachment. The listener has heard desire announced, love concealed, departure accepted, memory revisited and judgement overcome. Now the singer disappears willingly into an embrace.

But Carla Cook arrives with “You Don’t Know What Love Is,” and the certainty collapses again.

The song is one of the Great American Songbook’s most severe definitions of romantic experience. It argues that love cannot be understood without pain, sleeplessness, loss and the knowledge of what a kiss can cost.

Cook’s performance belongs near the end because it feels like a conclusion drawn from everything that preceded it. The earlier singers have enacted different chapters of romance. Cook steps back and names the larger condition.

Her voice gives the standard strength as well as vulnerability. The song is not a plea for sympathy. It is a challenge. Before claiming to understand love, the listener must first understand its consequences.

The album could have ended there, in hard-won emotional knowledge. Instead, Venus Records chooses a final transformation.

The closing track is “A String of Pearls,” performed by the vocal ensemble String of Pearls.

Glenn Miller made the composition famous as an instrumental big-band number, but the vocal group turns it into a compact, buoyant finale. At only 2 minutes and 41 seconds, it is the shortest performance on the album, arriving after Carla Cook’s extended meditation like the lights returning at the end of the night. (venusrecord.com)

The choice is clever. After nearly 89 minutes of romantic complexity, Vol. 13 does not leave the listener alone in the darkness. The voices gather together.

Until this moment, the album has largely been built around individual singers, each carrying her own story. The final track replaces the solitary confession with ensemble sound. Harmony becomes literal. Separate voices meet, overlap and move as one.

It is an optimistic ending, but not a simplistic one. The album has already acknowledged loneliness, secrecy, regret, foolishness and loss. The closing brightness feels earned because it arrives after those experiences rather than pretending they never existed.

The complete programme moves from Alexis Cole, Nicki Parrott, Sally Night and Simone through Laird Jackson, Adela Dalto, Tessa Souter, Barbara Carroll, Laura Ann, Nicole Henry, Champian Fulton, Cyrille Aimée, Anna Kolchina, Roseanna Vitro, Marilyn Scott and Carla Cook before concluding with String of Pearls. Venus Records presented the collection as a showcase for 17 great female vocal acts from its catalogue. (venusrecord.com)

For collectors of audiophile jazz vocals, the album offers a remarkably varied reference. Alexis Cole reveals articulation and tonal control. Nicki Parrott tests warmth and rhythmic intimacy. Simone’s arrangement combines voice with tenor saxophone and a full rhythm section. Tessa Souter and Barbara Carroll reveal low-level vocal detail, while Nicole Henry demands dynamic authority. Cyrille Aimée tests speed and rhythmic precision, and String of Pearls challenges a stereo system to separate several voices without breaking the ensemble apart.

A well-balanced high-end audio system should not make all these singers sound equally polished. It should reveal the differences in microphone technique, vocal weight, breath, phrasing and recording environment. The warmth of one voice should not erase the sharper edge of another. Intimacy should not become artificial closeness, and detail should not turn human expression into laboratory analysis.

That is the real value of the single-layer stereo SACD presentation. The format offers the possibility of greater resolution, but the purpose of that resolution is not to display technology. It is to preserve character. (hraudio.net)

Venus Records built much of its international reputation among jazz collectors and audiophiles by creating recordings with a vivid, immediate presence. On The Amazing Super Audio CD Sampler Vol. 13, that approach is especially effective because the human voice is the most familiar instrument of all. Listeners know instinctively when a voice feels emotionally present, even when they cannot explain the technical reasons.

The album therefore becomes more than a collection of female jazz singers or a demonstration disc for an SACD player. It is a story about the many ways a voice can occupy a song.

Alexis Cole opens the door with theatrical confidence. Nicki Parrott remains awake with black coffee. Simone hides a kiss in the shadows. Laird Jackson travels without unnecessary weight. Adela Dalto looks back upon wine and roses, while Nicole Henry refuses to cry for someone who returned too late. Champian Fulton confronts absence, Cyrille Aimée imagines an intimate table for two, Anna Kolchina remembers a lost musician, and Carla Cook explains that love cannot be understood without pain.

Then, at the end, the individual stories become a chorus.

That is why Venus – The Amazing Super Audio CD Sampler Vol. 13: Venus Great Lady Vocals remains such a compelling entry in the Japanese audiophile label’s sampler series. It offers 17 distinctive vocal performances, an extended 88-minute programme and a broad tour through classic jazz standards, Broadway songs, Brazilian melody and late-night balladry. More importantly, it allows each singer to remain herself.

The first voice enters alone.

The final voices leave together.

ramme.

This is the entrance to Venus – The Amazing Super Audio CD Sampler Vol. 13, an expansive collection devoted to the women of the Venus Records catalogue. Released in Japan on March 16, 2016, under catalogue number VHGD-138, the album carries the subtitle Venus Great Lady Vocals and presents 17 performances across almost 89 minutes. The Japanese edition was issued as a stereo single-layer SACD, requiring an SACD-compatible player rather than a conventional CD-only machine. (venusrecord.com)

The title may describe the singers collectively, but the album’s real achievement lies in how strongly it preserves their differences.

These are not 17 interchangeable interpretations of the Great American Songbook. Each vocalist enters with her own relationship to melody, rhythm, language and silence. Some performances are polished and romantic. Others are smoky, wounded, playful or quietly defiant. The accompanying musicians may provide piano, bass, drums and occasional horn colours, but the narrative belongs to the voices.

Vol. 13 unfolds like a sequence of encounters in an after-hours jazz club. One singer delivers a confession from the centre of the stage. Another appears to speak almost privately from the edge of the room. A Broadway standard becomes an adult secret, a Brazilian melody becomes an atmosphere, and a song of romantic disappointment acquires an unexpected sense of independence.

After Alexis Cole’s elegant opening, Nicki Parrott enters with “Black Coffee.”

The emotional temperature changes immediately. Where “My Heart Belongs to Daddy” carries theatrical wit, “Black Coffee” belongs to sleeplessness. The song lives in the hours when the conversation has ended but the mind refuses to become quiet. Its title suggests an ordinary cup on a table, yet generations of jazz singers have understood that the coffee is only a symbol for waiting, loneliness and emotional exhaustion.

Parrott is particularly well suited to that intimate world. As both a vocalist and bassist, she approaches a song with an instinctive sense of time. A phrase does not simply sit above the rhythm section; it settles into the pulse. The effect is controlled rather than dramatic, which allows the melancholy to emerge without being forced.

The contrast between the first two performances establishes the album’s central idea. Venus Great Lady Vocals is not organised around one mood. It moves through many versions of desire: playful desire, disappointed desire, secret desire, remembered desire and the determination to move beyond it.

Sally Night makes that need explicit with “I Wanna Be Loved.”

The title sounds simple, but the performance exists in the space between declaration and vulnerability. To say that one wants to be loved is also to admit that something is missing. Night allows the melody to retain its classic elegance while giving the words an emotional immediacy. The performance feels less like a nostalgic recreation of vintage vocal jazz than a direct statement delivered in the present tense.

Then Simone Kopmajer, credited on the album as Simone, takes the programme into the shadows with “We Kiss in a Shadow.”

Written by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II for The King and I, the song tells of affection forced into secrecy. On this recording, the arrangement includes pianist John Di Martino, bassist George Mraz, drummer Tim Horner and tenor saxophonist Eric Alexander, placing Simone’s voice inside a rich New York jazz setting. (MusicBrainz)

The melody is romantic, but the emotional world is uneasy. A kiss hidden from view is more than a tender moment; it carries the pressure of everything that cannot be openly acknowledged. Simone’s performance allows the song’s restraint to become its strength. The voice does not need to break apart to communicate longing. The tension is already present in what remains controlled.

By the fourth track, The Amazing Super Audio CD Sampler Vol. 13 has moved from sophisticated flirtation to nocturnal loneliness, from the desire to be loved to the danger of love that must remain concealed. The sequence feels less like a collection of unrelated standards than a developing story.

Laird Jackson changes the pace with “Traveling Light.”

The title suggests movement without baggage, but it can also imply the deliberate abandonment of emotional weight. Jackson’s performance brings a cooler kind of freedom into the programme. After the secrecy of “We Kiss in a Shadow,” “Traveling Light” sounds like someone deciding that departure may be healthier than waiting.

The arrangement leaves room for the words to move naturally. This is not escape presented as triumph. It is a quieter form of independence, shaped by the knowledge that every journey requires leaving something behind.

That idea of memory and consequence continues with Adela Dalto singing “The Days of Wine and Roses.”

Henry Mancini and Johnny Mercer’s song is often remembered for its beautiful melody, but beneath the elegance lies a darker story about pleasure, passing time and loss. Dalto does not need to underline every tragic implication. The composition carries its own sadness. Her task is to inhabit it.

The official Venus track sequence places Dalto directly before Tessa Souter, allowing two very different forms of sophisticated vocal jazz to meet in the centre of the album. (venusrecord.com)

Souter performs “The Lamp Is Low,” a song whose melodic roots draw upon Maurice Ravel. The familiar theme becomes a nocturnal jazz ballad, suspended between classical refinement and intimate vocal storytelling. The lamp of the title is more than part of the room. It creates the conditions for confession: reduced light, lowered voices and the feeling that the outside world has temporarily disappeared.

Souter’s performance fits naturally into the Venus Records aesthetic. The voice appears close, while the musicians create a surrounding space rather than a decorative background. The piano does not merely provide chords; it shapes the atmosphere. Bass and drums establish a pulse that feels almost private.

For audiophile listeners, this kind of performance reveals why female jazz vocals have long been central to high-end audio demonstrations. A revealing system must reproduce more than pitch. It must preserve breath, texture, consonants, the physical distance between singer and microphone, and the acoustic relationship between the voice and the accompanying instruments.

Yet Vol. 13 does not reduce its singers to test signals. The recording quality matters because the human differences matter.

Barbara Carroll’s “But Beautiful” offers one of the clearest examples.

Carroll was both a pianist and vocalist, and that dual identity gives her interpretation a special sense of structure. She understands the song from inside its harmony. The voice and piano do not seem like separate elements competing for attention; they emerge from the same musical thought.

“But Beautiful” is built around contradiction. Love can be tearful or cheerful, a problem or a pleasure, but still beautiful. Carroll treats that ambiguity as the heart of the song. The performance does not try to solve the contradiction. It simply allows both sides to exist.

After the emotional complexity of Carroll’s interpretation, Laura Ann introduces the soft Brazilian atmosphere of “Gentle Rain.”

Written by Luiz Bonfá with lyrics by Matt Dubey, the composition replaces the hard edges of heartbreak with something more fluid. Rain can suggest sadness, but gentle rain also brings quiet, renewal and intimacy. Laura Ann’s performance creates a moment of calm in the album’s unfolding narrative. (MusicBrainz)

The rhythm moves lightly beneath the melody. Nothing needs to be hurried. The song seems to arrive through the air rather than announce itself from the stage.

This is another moment where the extended SACD format serves the music. With 17 tracks and a total running time of 1 hour, 28 minutes and 58 seconds, the album has enough space to create gradual emotional transitions rather than compressing its singers into a short commercial sampler. (MusicBrainz)

Then Nicole Henry begins “Cry Me a River,” and the atmosphere hardens.

Arthur Hamilton’s standard has become one of the defining songs of romantic retaliation. It is not simply about sadness. It is about the moment when sadness becomes strength. The person who once caused the pain has returned too late, and the singer is no longer willing to offer easy forgiveness.

Henry brings dramatic authority to the song without losing control of its jazz character. The title phrase can be delivered as accusation, dismissal or bitter humour, and the performance gains power from moving among those emotional possibilities.

Placed after “Gentle Rain,” “Cry Me a River” creates one of the album’s sharpest transitions. The rain of the previous track was soft and atmospheric. Now the water has become a river of regret, and the singer refuses to be the one drowning in it.

Champian Fulton follows with “When Your Lover Has Gone.”

Fulton is also a pianist and singer, and her interpretation brings the directness of a working jazz musician to the standard. The song does not ask what happens when love begins. It asks what remains after love has left.

The answer is found in the rhythm of the performance. Even when the lyrics describe loss, the music continues to move. That movement is essential to jazz. The singer may be alone within the story, but she is not musically isolated. Piano, bass and drums respond, support and occasionally challenge her.

The track becomes less a portrait of defeat than an illustration of how sorrow can be shaped into swing.

Then Cyrille Aimée enters with “Tea for Two,” and suddenly the room feels lighter.

The Vincent Youmans standard is one of the oldest songs on the programme, but Aimée’s rhythmic imagination prevents it from sounding preserved behind glass. The melody carries the memory of Broadway and traditional jazz, while her phrasing introduces a more contemporary sense of freedom.

“Tea for Two” imagines a private domestic world built for a couple. In the context of Vol. 13, however, that simple fantasy arrives after songs of secrecy, departure, regret and abandonment. The innocence now feels knowingly temporary.

Aimée brings playfulness back to the album, but it is not naïve playfulness. It sounds like someone aware of the risks of romance and still willing to enjoy the invitation.

The mood turns reverent with Anna Kolchina’s interpretation of “I Remember Clifford.”

Benny Golson composed the piece in memory of trumpeter Clifford Brown, and Jon Hendricks later added lyrics. On this compilation, the song stands apart from the romantic narratives surrounding it. The loss is not the end of an affair but the absence of a musician whose life and art continue to resonate. The official album credits Golson and Hendricks for the composition and lyrics. (venusrecord.com)

Kolchina approaches the melody as remembrance rather than display. The performance asks the listener to slow down. A song like “I Remember Clifford” cannot be rushed without losing its meaning. Its emotional force comes from dignity.

The placement of the track is significant. After the light rhythmic lift of “Tea for Two,” memory returns with greater depth. Vol. 13 repeatedly refuses to remain comfortable for long. Every moment of ease is followed by another emotional question.

Roseanna Vitro continues the reflective mood with “My Foolish Heart.”

The Victor Young and Ned Washington standard addresses the dangerous point at which romantic feeling begins to overcome judgement. The heart is described as foolish because it continues toward something the mind already recognises as risky.

Vitro gives the song emotional weight without turning it into a fragile whisper. Her voice brings experience to the warning. This is not someone discovering romantic danger for the first time. It sounds like someone who knows the consequences and remains vulnerable to them anyway.

The recording has its own deep Venus Records history. MusicBrainz credits Eddie Higgins on piano, Ray Drummond on bass and Ben Riley on drums for the underlying session, recorded in New York in October 1998, with Tetsuo Hara and Todd Barkan among the producers associated with the performance. (MusicBrainz)

That personnel gives the track the feeling of a classic jazz encounter. Higgins’ elegance, Drummond’s grounded bass and Riley’s subtle rhythmic authority provide a setting in which Vitro can move freely without losing the song’s structure.

Marilyn Scott then sings Irving Berlin’s “I Got Lost in His Arms.”

The title suggests surrender, but Scott’s delivery gives that surrender an adult awareness. The song originally comes from Annie Get Your Gun, yet here it leaves the theatre behind and enters the closer world of vocal jazz. (MusicBrainz)

To become lost in someone’s arms can sound romantic, comforting or dangerous depending on the voice telling the story. Scott allows those possibilities to remain open. The arrangement does not need grand orchestration. A smaller jazz setting makes the emotional moment feel more immediate.

By this stage, the album has traced an entire cycle of attachment. The listener has heard desire announced, love concealed, departure accepted, memory revisited and judgement overcome. Now the singer disappears willingly into an embrace.

But Carla Cook arrives with “You Don’t Know What Love Is,” and the certainty collapses again.

The song is one of the Great American Songbook’s most severe definitions of romantic experience. It argues that love cannot be understood without pain, sleeplessness, loss and the knowledge of what a kiss can cost.

Cook’s performance belongs near the end because it feels like a conclusion drawn from everything that preceded it. The earlier singers have enacted different chapters of romance. Cook steps back and names the larger condition.

Her voice gives the standard strength as well as vulnerability. The song is not a plea for sympathy. It is a challenge. Before claiming to understand love, the listener must first understand its consequences.

The album could have ended there, in hard-won emotional knowledge. Instead, Venus Records chooses a final transformation.

The closing track is “A String of Pearls,” performed by the vocal ensemble String of Pearls.

Glenn Miller made the composition famous as an instrumental big-band number, but the vocal group turns it into a compact, buoyant finale. At only 2 minutes and 41 seconds, it is the shortest performance on the album, arriving after Carla Cook’s extended meditation like the lights returning at the end of the night. (venusrecord.com)

The choice is clever. After nearly 89 minutes of romantic complexity, Vol. 13 does not leave the listener alone in the darkness. The voices gather together.

Until this moment, the album has largely been built around individual singers, each carrying her own story. The final track replaces the solitary confession with ensemble sound. Harmony becomes literal. Separate voices meet, overlap and move as one.

It is an optimistic ending, but not a simplistic one. The album has already acknowledged loneliness, secrecy, regret, foolishness and loss. The closing brightness feels earned because it arrives after those experiences rather than pretending they never existed.

The complete programme moves from Alexis Cole, Nicki Parrott, Sally Night and Simone through Laird Jackson, Adela Dalto, Tessa Souter, Barbara Carroll, Laura Ann, Nicole Henry, Champian Fulton, Cyrille Aimée, Anna Kolchina, Roseanna Vitro, Marilyn Scott and Carla Cook before concluding with String of Pearls. Venus Records presented the collection as a showcase for 17 great female vocal acts from its catalogue. (venusrecord.com)

For collectors of audiophile jazz vocals, the album offers a remarkably varied reference. Alexis Cole reveals articulation and tonal control. Nicki Parrott tests warmth and rhythmic intimacy. Simone’s arrangement combines voice with tenor saxophone and a full rhythm section. Tessa Souter and Barbara Carroll reveal low-level vocal detail, while Nicole Henry demands dynamic authority. Cyrille Aimée tests speed and rhythmic precision, and String of Pearls challenges a stereo system to separate several voices without breaking the ensemble apart.

A well-balanced high-end audio system should not make all these singers sound equally polished. It should reveal the differences in microphone technique, vocal weight, breath, phrasing and recording environment. The warmth of one voice should not erase the sharper edge of another. Intimacy should not become artificial closeness, and detail should not turn human expression into laboratory analysis.

That is the real value of the single-layer stereo SACD presentation. The format offers the possibility of greater resolution, but the purpose of that resolution is not to display technology. It is to preserve character. (hraudio.net)

Venus Records built much of its international reputation among jazz collectors and audiophiles by creating recordings with a vivid, immediate presence. On The Amazing Super Audio CD Sampler Vol. 13, that approach is especially effective because the human voice is the most familiar instrument of all. Listeners know instinctively when a voice feels emotionally present, even when they cannot explain the technical reasons.

The album therefore becomes more than a collection of female jazz singers or a demonstration disc for an SACD player. It is a story about the many ways a voice can occupy a song.

Alexis Cole opens the door with theatrical confidence. Nicki Parrott remains awake with black coffee. Simone hides a kiss in the shadows. Laird Jackson travels without unnecessary weight. Adela Dalto looks back upon wine and roses, while Nicole Henry refuses to cry for someone who returned too late. Champian Fulton confronts absence, Cyrille Aimée imagines an intimate table for two, Anna Kolchina remembers a lost musician, and Carla Cook explains that love cannot be understood without pain.

Then, at the end, the individual stories become a chorus.

That is why Venus – The Amazing Super Audio CD Sampler Vol. 13: Venus Great Lady Vocals remains such a compelling entry in the Japanese audiophile label’s sampler series. It offers 17 distinctive vocal performances, an extended 88-minute programme and a broad tour through classic jazz standards, Broadway songs, Brazilian melody and late-night balladry. More importantly, it allows each singer to remain herself.

The first voice enters alone.

The final voices leave together.