Aubrey Johnson - LYDIALIEBMAN.COM

The Lively Air
Release date: March 20, 2026
Label: Greenleaf Music

The Lively Air, the second album from vocalist and composer Aubrey Johnson, features her six-piece jazz ensemble and an exquisitely crafted program of original arrangements and songs, the album marks Johnson's return to composing after several years focused primarily on recording and interpreting other artists’ music (notably, Lyle Mays, Billy Childs, Alex Sipiagin, Randy Napoleon, and more). The album serves as a brilliant companion to her critically hailed debut, the 2020 Outside In Music release Unraveled.

The album opens with two revelatory originals. Propelled by the elastic pulse laid down by bassist Matt Aronoff and texturally acute drummer Jay Sawyer, "Hope" is a delicately feathered but acrobatic ode to optimism in the face of tribulations. Written as part of a commission from the Portola Vineyards Summer Jazz series, it encapsulates many of Johnson's defining features as her liquid-mercury voice soars and swoops with breathtaking agility and she blends wordless vocal lines within the ensemble.

Moving into confessional mode, "The Words I Cannot Say" is a soul-bearing sojourn of emotional discovery, from wrath to rueful acceptance. Johnson wrote the piece at MacDowell and the arrangement makes brilliant use of her ensemble with Tomoko Omura's violin seeming to coax and anticipate the journey toward resolution, while Alex LoRe's bass clarinet evokes dark undercurrents of regret and dismay.

Writing for her ensemble, Johnson creates lush, shifting textural settings, favoring extended melodic lines whether she's delivering a lyric or a wordless passage. She credits a Chamber Music America-supported mentorship with pianist and composer Billy Childs with helping her hone the band's instrumental geography, creating arrangements where every instrument is calibrated around her voice.

"I like writing music that takes you on an emotional or dramatic journey, long-form pieces with an unusual number of sections or phrases," Johnson says. "I keep myself open to whatever I'm hearing, and resist the temptation to do melody-solo-melody, though of course I do that sometimes too. Alex's bass clarinet has such a beautiful, warm, round sound. I can have him doubling bass lines and low piano lines. And Tomoko can play arco or pizz, so I can almost write for two different instruments."

Omura also contributes "The Miracle Is In Us," an inventive piece that transforms text from Maggie Tokuda-Hall's children's book Love In The Library into an enthralling musical account of the author's Japanese-American grandparents falling in love while interned during World War II. Bisected by a passionate dance between Omura's violin and LoRe's flute in a long central passage, the song reaches an ecstatic plateau as Johnson's wordless vocals reach her upper register.

Johnson's crystalline sound takes center stage with her reverent arrangement of Joni Mitchell's "Help Me," which ingeniously expands on the blueprint of the Court and Spark original. It's a performance that affirms her deep affinity for Mitchell's music (a relationship introduced with her liquid grace rendition of "Conversation" on her 2022 duo album with pianist Randy Ingram, Play Favorites). For sheer jaw-dropping fluidity, Johnson offers a joyous romp through "Chorinho," a piece written as a tribute to Brazilian composer Egberto Gismonti by her late uncle, the great keyboardist and composer Lyle Mays (1953-2020). It was conceived as an instrumental, but Mays "challenged me to learn it for some performances we did back in 2010, and it has been with me since," Johnson writes in the album's liner notes.

Kurt Elling's and bassist Rob Amster's setting for Theodore Roethke's poem "The Waking" is a duo tour de force for Johnson and Aronoff and provides fuel for its rise as a contemporary jazz standard. Her collaboration with her brother Gentry Johnson, "I'll Never Need To Know," is a strong contender for standard status itself. As part of the Portola commission she challenged herself to set someone else's text to music, and after a long fruitless search for an appropriate poem she recalled that her brother had sent her one during the Covid lockdown. "We collaborated on the first album, but that was a song we wrote years ago, so it was fun for us to work together again," she recalls. "The music was inspired a lot by Fred Hersch, a good friend and mentor whose music I've sung quite a bit."

The album closes with another gorgeous composition by Mays, "Quem é Você" (Close To Home). She had always loved the tune, but it was only after Mays was gone that Johnson discovered the song's Portuguese lyrics by Luiz Avellar, recorded by Milton Nascimento on his overlooked 1991 album O Planeta Blue na Estrada do Sol. It's a big, sublime performance by Johnson, and another compelling example of her group's powerful chemistry.

She arranged all the pieces, except Omura's "The Miracle Is In Us," but fmully credits her bandmates for their contributions. Omura and Aronoff have been part of the group since Johnson first assembled it for a residency at the lamented Cornelia Street Café. She has known Sawyer since they were undergrads together, and he took over the drum chair after the 2022 death of Jeremy Noller, to whom the album is dedicated. She knew LoRe from her graduate studies at New England Conservatory. Primarily an alto saxophonist, he stretched for the album. Pianist Chris McCarthy, who attended NEC after Johnson, rounds out the ensemble.

"The music is shaped around what they can do individually," she says. "Chris McCarthy went to NEC after me and he's brilliant. He can play anything. He had so much to add orchestrationally. Everything he plays is incredibly tasteful. I'm a pianist and I write from the piano, so finding him was a very important piece to making this happen."

As on her first album, The Lively Air was co-produced and edited by bassist Steve Rodby, who worked extensively with Mays in the Pat Metheny Group, and mixed and mastered by Rich Breen. It's the same production team she collaborated with on "Eberhard," Mays' 13-minute piece composed in homage to his mentor, the German composer and jazz bassist Eberhard Weber. Released the year after his death, the piece, which features Johnson on vocals, garnered Mays his 12th Grammy Award (for best instrumental composition).

"We're carrying forward my family legacy," Johnson says. "Lyle entrusted his estate to me and made it clear he wanted me to keep going. He was such a natural composer. He wrote all the time. It's less natural for me, but something I love. It was so cool to work with Steve and Rich again, they're the best team."

With The Lively Air, Johnson continues to define her own sonic space, a realm of startling and unapologetic beauty.

Unraveled
Release date: March 20, 2020
Label: Outside in Music

Unraveled marks this consummate jazz vocalist’s arrival as a composer, arranger, and bandleader with a captivating vision of her own. On this ten-track collection of original compositions along with newly arranged gems, Aubrey Johnson is joined by a group of stellar musicians who accompanied her recording journey: pianist Chris Ziemba, drummer Jeremy Noller, and bassist Matt Aronoff. Adding striking orchestral textures are Tomoko Omura on violin and Michael Sachs on bass clarinet and alto sax. Brazilian jazz musician Vitor Gonçalves adds masterly accordion work on two tracks. Production credit goes to bassist Steve Rodby of the Pat Metheny Group. Although Johnson arranged every piece on the recording, she credits her bandmates — who first collaborated as a group in 2014 — with shaping the music over the course of dozens of gigs, particularly regular performances at NYC’s Cornelia Street Café. Unraveled tells the story of an artist and her band coming together and forging a fresh, distinctive sound unlike that of any other ensemble on the scene.

Over the past decade, Johnson has joined an exclusive coterie of brilliant singers and collaborated with a dazzling array of New York City’s most creative and adventurous artists. Equally adept at delivering wordless melodic lines like a virtuoso horn player and interpreting profound lyrics with emotional acuity, she often performs with intrepid vocalist peers including Portuguese-born Sara Serpa, Argentinian Sofia Rei, and LA native Michael Mayo, a rising star. She has also contributed to acclaimed recordings by the Andrew Rathbun Large Ensemble, Brian Carpenter’s Ghost Train Orchestra, Joe Phillips’ Numinous Ensemble, pianist Jason Yeager, and the inimitable Bobby McFerrin, on his 2010 Grammy-nominated VOCAbuLaries.

Unraveled opens with the Johnson-arranged jazz/pop excursion “No More ‘I Love You’s’,” a 1995 hit for Annie Lennox originally written and recorded by the 1980s English duo The Lover Speaks (aka David Freeman and Joseph Hughes). Johnson’s composition, the heartrending ballad “Love Again” revels in vulnerability, with a melody that rises as the emotional stakes peak. Set to a seductively slinky groove played with percussive precision by Noller, the title track, another of Aubrey’s own compositions, combines a spritely, eminently danceable melody with a poignant portrait of mounting inner angst. Jimmy Rowles’ “The Peacocks” — a tune also known as “A Timeless Place” after vocalist Norma Winstone added her own lyrics — is delivered with impressive poise, control and range, allowing Johnson to make the piece truly her own. Antonio Carlos Jobim’s bossa nova standard “Dindi” is performed here hauntingly in its original Portuguese. The languorous, Johnson-composed “Lie In Wait” captures the nagging inner monologue inspired by a prolonged separation in a romantic relationship.

Altogether, the album serves as an ideal showcase for Johnson’s impressive songwriting talents, yet it also includes two songs by her esteemed album collaborators. Saxophonist Michael Sachs composed and arranged the sumptuously detailed and pop-influenced “Happy to Stay” — an exquisite melody buoyed by Tomoko Omura’s insistent pizzicato pulse. Omura, knowing Johnson’s affinity for Brazilian music, also composed and arranged the innovative samba “Voice Is Magic,” adding the additional challenge of including a lyric in Japanese. Then there is “These Days,” Johnson’s captivating art song setting for a verse written by her brother, Gentry Johnson.

Johnson’s abiding passion for the treasure-laden Brazilian songbook injects another jolt of creative energy into the album’s concluding tracks. She offers a bravura wordless romp through Egberto Gismonti’s “Karate,” playing tag with Vitor Gonçalves’ playful accordion and Chris Ziemba‘s piano “on the least ‘arranged’ track on the record,” says Johnson. “I’ve always had a penchant for singing wordless vocal melodies and a habit of trying to find melodies that seem impossible to sing.”

As an undergrad at Western Michigan University, Johnson studied classical and jazz voice and joined Gold Company, the university’s world-renowned vocal jazz ensemble. A standout performer, she won two DownBeat Collegiate Student Music Awards for “Best Jazz Vocalist” and “Jazz Vocalist, Outstanding Performance.” She made her auspicious recording debut in 2007’s Essence of Green (Origin Records) by pianist Ron DiSalvio and legendary drummer Jimmy Cobb. Western is also where she first connected with piano master Fred Hersch, “a great influence and mentor and friend,” she says. On Hersch’s advice, the Green Bay, Wisconsin native began her NEC master’s degree in jazz performance in 2007, during which she studied with Danilo Perez, Jerry Bergonzi, Dominique Eade, Allan Chase, George Garzone, and Frank Carlberg. Graduating with honors, she was awarded the Gunther Schuller Medal for “making an extraordinary contribution to the life of the school,” and won her third DownBeat Magazine Collegiate Student Music Award, for outstanding performance in jazz voice.

It was during her college years that she also forged a deep musical connection with her uncle, Lyle Mays, the pianist and composer who gained fame with the Pat Metheny Group. In 2009 and 2010, she contributed wordless vocals and auxiliary keyboards for Mays, including concerts at the Zeltsman Marimba Festival and the Gilmore Keyboard Festival, where she performed several world premieres of pieces written with her unique voice in mind. By the time she made the move to New York City in 2011, Johnson had recorded with Bobby McFerrin on his Grammy-nominated album VOCAbuLaries (EmArcy). While commuting to Boston to teach at Berklee, where she remains a member of the faculty, she quickly became known as an essential new voice on the scene, performing with a daunting array of artists and ensembles, including Fred Hersch’s Pocket Orchestra, Sara Serpa’s City Fragments, John Zorn’s Mycale Vocal Quartet, Joe Phillips’ Numinous Ensemble, Andrew Rathbun’s Large Ensemble, Rose and the Nightingale, and Travis Sullivan’s Bjorkestra. A dedicated educator who has given master classes and workshops around the world, Johnson is also on the faculty at Queens College in New York.

The seeds for her band were sown in Boston, where she met violinist Tomoko Omura in the Guy Mendilow Ensemble, a world folk combo, and they bonded instantly over their commitment to jazz. Omura’s incomparable skills as an improviser continue to provide inspiration for Johnson’s writing and arranging. Reed expert Michael Sachs was part of her circle of friends at NEC, with whom she reconnected in New York City. She first encountered Ziemba, Noller, and Aronoff on a session to which she brought several original pieces, “and they sounded so great that I ended up using them on my first gig as a leader in New York,” Johnson says. The group gained so much attention through a series of performances at Cornelia Street Café, Shapeshifter Lab, the Kitano, Zinc Bar, and the Cell Theatre that she didn’t think twice about using the same cast on her debut album.

STEPHANIE JONES
DOWNBEAT
During the past decade, vocalist Aubrey Johnson has explored different chambers of her artistry and performed with an array of musicians, including singers Bobby McFerrin and Sara Serpa, as well as Brian Carpenter’s Ghost Train Orchestra. Johnson’s leader debut, Unraveled (Outside In)—a program featuring original compositions and new sextet arrangements of standards—takes listeners on a dramatic journey through her intriguing aesthetic. Read this feature here.