Bookended with canonical traditional songs and sung in eerily bright a cappellas, Gamble is a confident, self-produced debut by an exciting new voice. This is Zoé Basha, a Dublin-based French-American singer and guitarist whose folk music swims deftly around country, jazz, French chanson and the blues.
This is a nourishing, impressive 11-song set, with Basha’s voice swooping high and low like the Appalachian mountain music she loves. It begins boldly with Love Is Teasin’, first recorded by Appalachian singer Jean Ritchie and covered by Shirley Collins on her 1958 debut. Basha’s precise enunciation nails her protagonist’s wearisome experience of love, but a friskiness also lurks at the ends of her phrases, her highest notes tremulous with heat. She also masters playfulness on Sweet Papa Hurry Home (a cover of Jack Neville and Jimmie Rodgers’s 1932 country song, Sweet Mama Hurry Home, which shows how naturally the genre’s roots mixed with jazz), sweet suggestiveness on Come Find Me Lonesome, an original tailor-made for a blues club: “Cold is creeping up my spine in the night-time.”
